Released: 8th May
Seen: 28th July
In 2021, a new adaptation of the video game Mortal Kombat came out. While its release was mildly hampered due to the pandemic (it was delayed and then released simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max because of that plague we all lived through and seem to want to pretend didn’t happen), the film did well enough and got moderately good reviews. I enjoyed it well enough but found it to be a little bit of a lore dump overstuffed with exposition that no one actually gives a fuck about because, while the lore of Mortal Kombat is surely fascinating, it’s not the thing that anyone really remembers about that franchise. The big thing was that we didn’t get to enjoy the tournament-style fights that the game franchise was known for and that felt like a big mistake… Well, Mortal Kombat II clearly heard everyone saying how much they wanted the tournament and decided to give us exactly that, and it’s a better movie because of it.
Mortal Kombat II picks up shortly after the first movie but changes the central focus. Now the film largely follows Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), an action star who gets pulled into the tournament unwillingly by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee). Johnny is basically forcibly recruited to fight in the tournament alongside Sonya, Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), and Cole Young (Lewis Tan). Their opponents are Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who is a secondary protagonist for this film, Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), Kano (Josh Lawson) and Kung Lao (Max Huang). Then they fight… that’s kinda it, there’s some stuff about an amulet, Johnny learns his own strength and Kitana deals with some childhood trauma but it’s mostly just a bunch of cool violent fight scenes.
Mortal Kombat II feels like someone finally decided to start the game properly instead of just sticking to the tutorial level that was the first movie and thank god. This film doesn’t waste any time with over-extended exposition or explaining the deep lore, it got all of that out of the way last time so now they can just enjoy the depraved fun of throwing superpowered godlike fighters (and also Johnny Cage) into a ring and letting them punch each other really hard until there’s no more blood or gore to spray around the place. It’s simple, it’s effective, it’s absurdly fun at times and it’s pretty much the exact thing people have been wanting since the first time someone in a boardroom stopped doing cocaine for 8 seconds to yell “Let’s make a movie out of Mortal Kombat”.
The setup for Mortal Kombat II is diabolically simple: every scene is basically an extended fight scene, with a small transitional bit of dialogue in between to justify this being a feature-length film and not just a showreel for the fight choreographer, and that’s all it ever needed to be. Every fight is just some glorious absurd battle where people use whatever the hell is within reach to give their opponent some new holes, they’re insanely well performed and shot so you can enjoy every single punch as it lands. There isn’t any holding back, everyone can do insane, over-the-top, cool-looking gymnastics while kicking and stabbing each other and it’s fun, it’s just big stupid fun without worrying about pesky little things like physics, logic or the amount of blood that the human body contains. Fuck all that, you come to the Mortal Kombat franchise to watch big people do comically over-the-top acts of violence to each other and this film understands that.
That doesn’t mean Mortal Kombat II is completely plotless though, it’s just not overburdened by it. It still gives several major characters a great arc, there’s a very earnest attempt to make sure this tournament isn’t completely one-sided the whole time and it absolutely raises the stakes from the previous film. This really does feel like a potentially apocalyptic battle where anyone or anything could kick the bucket at any minute. In fact, that’s one of the big things this movie does even better than the one before: it removes a lot of the plot armour from the main cast, so anyone can and will die at any moment. Major characters who were a huge part of this and the last movie are fully capable of having their heads ripped off at any moment, without warning, and that gives the film real tension. Sure, the fights are cool, but there’s never any guarantee that the good guys are gonna win and that makes things more exciting.
Of course, one slight problem that the fight scenes do have, and thus the entire film has, is that they are incredibly overstuffed to the point where they can drag out for a while. Even with most of the boring lore dumps gone, Mortal Kombat II is somehow longer than the last one and part of that is just that every fight has to go on for an absurd amount of time. There’s a lot of pausing; one particular fight has a moment where someone could probably win the fight if they just made a move but instead they just stand and stare in silence while the other person recovers and it makes no sense. It makes the film drag on, to the point where you can start to lose interest during the fight scenes which are the entire reason this franchise exists! I shouldn’t be going “Hurry up” when someone is fighting over pits of lava but that’s a thing that this film does. When everything is going at a good pace and they’re battling back and forth, it’s fun, but boy, when they lose momentum, it takes a while to get it back.
Mortal Kombat II feels more like what you would hope a film based on this franchise would end up looking like, wall-to-wall fight scenes with various levels of absurd comic violence and a bunch of elaborate, over-the-top characters that fill a well-detailed world. It has a few pacing issues and some of the characters aren’t as interesting as they could be but in general it’s a huge step up from the last film because it just leans in to the actual fun of this whole franchise. Its big bloody battles deliver on the promise of the kind of entertainment that once got the game banned in several households. Seeing it all up on the big screen is a really fun time, here’s hoping they can fine-tune it a little more and really go for the gusto should there be a third entry in this series.
Movie Meister Reviews 