Mortal Kombat: A Hot and Cold Disappointment

 

Finally, a video game movie that captures the feeling of handing the controller off to your older brother to beat the hard level. Mortal Kombat (2021) has a few genuinely interesting ideas and decent looking fights that it has no idea what to do with. It was all downhill from action legend Joe Taslim blood knifing Scorpion in the trailer. His involvement had my interest from the moment I heard about it and his resume is undeniably stacked, but unfortunately it fails to cohere into a sensible film.
    The story follows MMA fighter and loving family man Cole Young (Lewis Tan). He’s an underdog and he cares about his daughter a lot but we spend very little time with this part of him before his his Mortal Kombat birthright, foreshadowed by a prologue sequence and the best action setpiece in the film between Sub Zero (Taslim) and Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, comes home to roost. He’s attacked by the very same Sub Zero and rescued by Jax (Mechad Brooks), who tells him what to do and where to go for him to Mortally Kombat. Maybe this is another attempt at emulating video game narrative, because what follows is a lot of Cole going to a place and/or talking to a person, having a conflict develop and then immediately get resolved in that place, and then learning that he should go somewhere else and/or talk to another person. Famous characters from the franchise get introduced, barely talked about, then killed shortly after. Centrally important characters like Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade get done dirty by this attitude as well, shoving her important moments off screen. It’s lumpy, disconnected, and unsatisfying.
    Not that bona fides are necessary, the movie should stand on its own, but I love fighting games. Mortal Kombat has never been my go-to game but I’ll still watch a tournament if it’s happening. Basically I have enough familiarity to recognize the characters and The Moment When They Do Their Thing from the Game but not enough to be excited by it. I’m a self proclaimed MCU-liker so I’m not gonna get too fussy about straight fanservice, but there’s nothing to hang these moments on. There’s a sequence in the Earth champions’ training where Kano gets hit by Liu Kang doing the same sweep move over and over again because he won’t learn to adapt, which is a place anybody learning a fighting game has been in before. It happened to dominate the Annihilator Cup, a big promotional MK event full of new players, a few weeks ago! This doesn’t get explained, expanded upon, or referenced ever again though as the narrative continues to meander from concept to concept with little direction. It’s played for comedy, and it was funny in real life too, but competitors bettering themselves and learning is the hook that keeps game franchises like this one in business. You could build real emotion out of that nugget but the movie blows past it. Watching players experiment to take down a seemingly unbeatable strategy in real time is really satisfying, and the guy who actually won the Annihilator Cup was playing really well by the end.
    Mortal Kombat makes vague motions at having a theme and character development but forgets that maybe those things should be important to the plot. Instead we get a lot of explaining the rules of the in-universe Mortal Kombat tournament that doesn’t even happen in this movie and how the participants need to find it within themselves to turn Super Saiyan. The film sends it off with an ending that undercuts Cole’s development and agency as hard as possible and a sequel bait tease of more famous MK names. Taslim is already signed on for a franchise, and the returns on this one have been good. How much of this can be attributed to proliferating vaccination and a general excitement to return to the theater after a nega-year is debatable. If Mortal Kombat narrowly found its footing financially, they’re gonna have a long row to hoe with these follow-ups to fill out the story.