Starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Tadanobu Asano, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Chin Han, Joe Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada

Directed by Simon McQuoid

Out now on digital download, 4K, Blu-ray and DVD

Spoilers

Earth’s fate hangs on the result of the Mortal Kombat tournament after nine straight victories by Outworld. Should Shang Tsung’s forces be victorious for a tenth time, he will rule the world, but the dark sorcerer has no intention of fighting fair.

There’s a reason why the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie is remembered fondly (even if its sequel was a stinker) and it’s not just that ridiculously catchy techno title track which can still get dancefloors full to this day. That version of Mortal Kombat, toned down to get the age rating which would allow the game’s main audience to see it, understood that the premise of the game and the backstory created for it were inherently silly, and it leaned into that silliness with camp flair, some great tongue in cheek humour, and just enough seriousness to pull it all off, even as it winked at its audience.

2021’s version, on the other hand, treats its subject matter with absolute seriousness, and that’s a problem. I’m not just talking about the gleefulness with which it wears its 15 rating, full of a lot of language and a fair amount of gore (though nowhere near as much as hyped up audiences may be expecting), but everything it does. There’s no sense at any point, as there was in the earlier movie, that anyone here is in on the joke. It’s a story wherein the fate of the world is determined by fisticuffs between various martial artists from across different realms of reality. It’s a story in which martial arts skills are only a small part of those fights, given that the various fighters can also create flames from their fists, wield magical weapons, shoot lasers from their eyes and have bionic arms.

Worst of all, not only does the movie take all this subject matter far more earnestly than it really should, but it spends so long on actual buildup that by the time we get to the real meat of the action, it’s only got around 45 minutes of its run time remaining. By the time it’s fleshed out the backstory of main character Cole Young, introduced him to some fellow travellers, had them make their way to Lord Raiden’s secret temple and get some training, nearly two-thirds of the movie has elapsed, leaving the final act to be a scattering of individual fights which don’t last all that long and don’t really feel – by the end – as if they’ve resolved anything. The actual tournament – the whole reason we are supposedly here – never actually happens, and there’s no real indication from the movie whether this actually matters at all.

Perhaps most egregious of all is the way in which the movie treats the relationship between iconic series characters Scorpion and Sub Zero (aka Hanzo Hasashi and Bi-Han respectively). If you’ve seen the opening seven minutes of the movie on YouTube, released by the studio a few days ago, you know how it opens on these guys centuries ago. Thing is, although Sub Zero is present for most of the movie as Tsung’s main champion, Scorpion is only vaguely visually referenced for most of the movie. His connection to current events isn’t revealed until we are more than an hour in, and even then the guy himself doesn’t actually arrive again until near the end, wherein the movie goes back suddenly to focusing quite particularly on the rivalry between the two of them.

But here’s the thing, even leaving aside how this is just randomly bookending the actual plot of the movie, we aren’t given any reason to really invest in their rivalry. The movie tells us absolutely nothing about either character, who they are, what the source of their enmity is, why Bi-Han pursued his bloody vengeance against Hanzo in that opening scene. Nothing. It’s just left to us to buy into the fact that they’re great rivals whose beef transcends time and dimensional planes because… reasons. We don’t even know why Sub Zero is working for Shang Tsung, because the movie declines to explain.

If it sounds like I hated every minute of this, I didn’t. There’s stuff here for franchise fans, though it’s stretched pretty thin. Scorpion’s signature spear weapon with his iconic ‘Get over here!’ line? Present and correct. Brutal fatalities you’ll recognise from the games? Well, a couple. Best of the cast by some considerable margin is Josh Lawson, who seems the only member of the ensemble who’s in on the joke. His Kano, a vicious, murderous assassin for hire who doesn’t care about anyone or anything, is a character who you’ll love to hate, and his arc is one of the few things the movie manages to do pretty well. Tadanobu Asano and Chin Han as Raiden and Shang Tsung respectively feel utterly wasted, reduced to giving exposition and occasionally waving their hands to do some ‘magic’, but each is likeable enough and has enough screen presence that they just about manage to transcend the material, though nowhere near as well as Lambert and the legendary Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa did back in the day. Lewis Tan is a charismatic enough lead but his insertion into the mythos next to all these other long-established characters combined with his extremely predictable character arc leave very little for him to actually do. Ludi Lin, who has the physique of a young Bruce Lee and is a proficient martial artist, plays Liu Kang well but again the script leaves him criminally underserved. There’s no doubt that he should have been the main character here.

The fact that most of the villains are either CGI, covered in heavy makeup or wearing masks means that they get little chance to assert themselves as actual characters. Of all of them, Sub Zero gets the most screen time and the lion’s share of the script’s attention, even including Shang Tsung himself, and given that all we know about him by the end of the movie is that he murdered Hanzo’s family and he can do weird things with ice, that’s not saying much either way.

Ironically enough, perhaps the biggest criticism of the movie I can think of is that there isn’t really all that muck ‘Kombat’ in the thing. There’s more than there was in the notoriously fight-light ’95 version, but given all the hype that this has had, the ‘R’ rating, the promises of living up the ultra violence of the source material, there is nowhere near as much fighting in this one as there should be.

The thing closes with a clear intent to deliver a sequel, teasing a character inexplicably absent from this movie (and one that the thing could desperately have done with at that, if only to inject a little self-awareness and levity into proceedings) but whether we will see that or not remains to be seen. I suspect the target audience may find themselves a little bored by how slowly it gets to the ‘good stuff’, how fleeting the fighty bits are and how unsatisfying the resolution is. Then again, maybe they’ll just be happy they get a Mortal Kombat film with IP-appropriate gore and lots of swearing.

The home entertainment version includes some behind the scenes features, and deleted scenes but no commentary.

Verdict: Disappointing – not as big or clever as it would like to think it is, and not as punk, violent or counter cultural as it promised to be. Distinctly average stuff. 5/10

Greg D. Smith