Add Decider on Google More On: video games ‘Fallout’ Cast Reacts to Aaron Paul Joining the Series For Season 3: “We’ve Wanted Him On the Show Forever, He’s Put In the Work” ‘Mortal Kombat 2’ Comes to Digital, But When Will the Newest ‘Mortal Kombat’ Movie Be Streaming? Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ on VOD, A Sequel That Punishes Its Audience For Its Loyalty To Nintendo When Will ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ Be Streaming Free on Peacock and Netflix? Mortal Kombat (2021) did not FINISH HIM and now it wants you to GET OVER HERE and watch Mortal Kombat II (now on VOD platforms like Prime Video), which does the big dumb obvious thing its predecessor failed to do, namely, deliver the movie version of a Mortal Kombat combat tournament. Notably, the first film in the video-game franchise reboot (Christopher “Highlander” Lambert headlined a 1995 adaptation, but skipped the 1997 sequel) emerged during that weird part of the Covid pandemic when movies simultaneously debuted in theaters and on streaming, and became one of the most popular movies on HBO Max in 2021. Translation: A sequel was inevitable, and interest was enough to draw a solid $128 million at the worldwide box office. MKII brings back 11 cast members from the first film, with newcomers Adeline Rudolph (the Resident Evil TV series) and Karl Urban (The Boys, Lord of the Rings, etc.) playing whatever passes for main characters in a movie full of whatever passes for characters participating in whatever passes as a story. Not that we’re here for anything but the fighting, mind you.
The Gist: Two minutes in and the bladdiddy-blah exposition has already squashed my interest down to subatomic size: Great start, Mortal Kombat II! There’s some narration and some dialogue and the words “dominion” and “realm” are said about 350 times each. This dialogue, man. It’s like everyone’s chewing on pole-vaulting mats when they’re not choking on the Wisconsin cheese-curd words passing as “comic” “banter.” In this turgid REALM, DOMINION is something people apparently yearn to acquire, and you can’t just Amazon-Prime a palletful of it overnight. No, you have to engage in some mortal combat — which, in the Mortal Kombat movies, is called Mortal Kombat — to get you some of that sweet, sweet DOMINION, thus allowing you to lord over all your DOMINION-LESS friends about how much DOMINION you have. Is this the actual plot of the movie? Fuck if I know. But I think I’m making it more interesting with minimal thought, and yes, that’s commentary on the quality of storytelling happening here.
There’s an early scene in which the guy with the most DOMINION in the REALM of Otherworld, a skull-helmeted brute named Shao Khan (Martyn Ford), kills some nice people and tells their young daughter, Kitana (Sophia Xu), “You’re MY daughter now!”— which was followed by, sadly, the only laughter I’d emit during the entire movie. Some years later, Kitana is an adult played by Rudolph, a fighter with fold-up hand fans outfitted with razor-sharp blades that can slice through carotids and aortas like they’re nothin’. Yes, she’s still Shao Khan’s adopted daughter, but she ain’t happy about it. She’s been trained in the Kombat Artz by her ninja nanny Jade (Tati Gabrielle).
Meanwhile, in the REALM known as Earthrealm, which is actually just our regular old Earth except stupider if you can believe that, dwells a washed-up action-movie chump named Johnny Cage (Urban). He’s been relegated to schlepping headshots — as in photographs, not John Wick, a movie that the Cage character bitterly references as the downfall of his cornball-’90s-movie career — to autograph for cosplay dorks at comic-cons. For reasons that are utterly beguiling, the Kombat Godz deem him worthy of representing his REALM in the Mortal Kombat tournament. Although it may just be fate saying that this sad sack of poop of a person would certainly be buoyed by the life-giving nectar that is DOMINION, if only he had a means of getting some.
So for reasons and by means far too stultifyingly dull to summarize here, Cage ends up in Otherworld, waiting to fight in the Mortal Kombat tournament of Mortal Kombat. Other fighters include: Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Shang Tsung (Chin Han), Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and some others. Which of these fighters are good guys or bad guys is beyond me. Some might not even be alive anymore, but they fight anyway, since life and death have absolutely no meaning in this movie, despite it prominently featuring the word “mortal” in the title. You’re also not going to give a single flying dang about any of these fighters. They just blur together into a tornado-like whirl of cardboard dickheads going on endlessly about DOMINION and maybe also about a jackass amulet that makes Shao Khan immortal or something. But one thing is for certain: THIS is MORTAL KOMBAT!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Street Fighter movies that I nearly forgot existed despite the fact that Jean-Claude Van Damme headlined the first one (soon to be rebooted with Jason Momoa as Blanka, ferchrissake), Big Trouble in Little China, and In the Mood for Love, of course, duh.
Performance Worth Watching: I’m just gonna say that I like Karl Urban and I think he’s underrated but also keep in mind that not every movie an actor appears in is not going to be a piece of shit.
Our Take: Mortal Kombat II is just a live-action version of “fighting anime,” where an impossible-to-penetrate plot unfolds within the context of an impossible-to-penetrate franchise mythology, all of which is utterly disposable because the only thing viewers want to see is the smoking-hot fighting action. If you’re not nurturing pre-existing affection for the video-game characters you ordered via various combinations of button-pressing to horizontally slice up their heads or rip their gullets out with hooks, none of this will carry any weight. The movie appeals to 11-year-olds who sneak-watch it for gory thrills when their parents aren’t in the room, and banks on adults’ franchise nostalgia. If you don’t fall into either of those audience buckets, you’ll doze off in no time.
Again, following this plot is a Sisyphean endeavor, so you’re better off just letting the boulder roll down the hill into the pit where it belongs. And without a decent story, the dramatic stakes die a miserable death — by impalement or being chopped in half the long way, choose your metaphor — exacerbated by the screenplay’s life-death-the-universe-whatever-who-cares approach to life, death, and the universe, all of which are usually important things in other contexts. And so that leaves us with the battles, which consist of a bunch of quasi-characters hurling, spitting, farting, and eyeball-blasting special effects at each other in front of colorfully ugly backdrops. Fight choreography is delegated to the editor, who does a decent enough job, but honestly, the work is like turning shit into fertilizer and then throwing the fertilizer into a dumpster.
Full disclosure: I, at best, shrug with vague affection at my long nights playing Mortal Kombat on my Sega Genesis in the ’90s. Seeing All’a Them Teeth Guy come to “life” via somewhat acceptable CGI, or Johnny Cage sliding his sunglasses up his nose with his middle finger before punching a bro in the crotch, doesn’t do much for me. This is a deeply silly movie that quickly warp-speeds past being entertaining into the REALM of crushing boredom. It offers scant DOMINION as a reward. It seems significantly less fun than the 2021 film, if memory serves, although it strikes me now that it might not have been particularly memorable. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood, or maybe I’m in a good mood and am feeling defensive about maintaining it. Either way, Mortal Kombat II blows.
Our Call: Who the hell needs any DOMINION anyway? SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
