Hey! When it comes to this franchise, I’m a bit like Sergeant Shultz; I know nuzink! Nuzink! I’ve never seen the previous movies, and if you’d said to me, ‘Mortal Kombat; it’s that old fighting game’, I would have said, ‘oh yeah… wait, isn’t that Streetfighter?’ I tell you this now, not only to embarrass myself, but because if something happens in this new movie that is sacrilegious to the source material, I’m not going to know. I’m just going to assess the movie that’s in front of me. Here I go at it.
Alright, let me get this straight. Mortal Kombat is an ancient tournament. And we are on the eve of a battle between the Earth realm and the Outer realm. Competitors of Earth are selected by a mysterious brand that shows up on their skin, and if another human kills them before the tournament, the brand transfers for them to participate. But because the Outer-realm is such villainous scum, they have manipulated the Earth realm so that the tournament is not widely known, so Earth’s heroes don’t prepare or train. And if the Outer realm defeats the Earth realm for a tenth time, a prophecy says their ruler can invade and conquer. Is that about right? Okay, I watched Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, I can get on board with this. It’s a pretty cool starting point actually, and any franchise where an unlikely team of destined individuals have to protect Earth from evil forces, to release a movie after The Avengers, should make bank. I hope the premise I outlined is correct anyway, as the movie skips by the details very quickly, as it’s probably assumed that anyone taking the time to watch this movie already understand Mortal Kombat; fair enough. And due to an inviting tone, I didn’t hold a lack of clarity against Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and I’m not going to hold it against Mortal Kombat now. I actually picked up on a lot more than I gave myself credit – the victory power stances, the references to finishing opponents and fatalities; I forgot I watch Jeremy Jahn’s YouTube channel religiously, and he loves a Mortal Kombat game review. But I’m sure there’s a lot more fan-servicey stuff that went over my head; like when Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) returns after he’d helmed an unusual choice for a weapon (a dagger on a string), I was like ‘oh, I get it now.’
Do you reckon the people behind Suicide Squad are watching this and realising they missed one in regards to Captain Boomerang? I do. Josh Lawson would have been available, and if he was allowed to be anything close to as roguishly Aussie as he is here, then he would have been bloody brilliant, alongside Margot Robbie and Will Smith. But they went with Jai Courtney, the bigger name actor with the resume behind him, including famous franchises like Die Hard, Divergent and Terminator. And it’s not like superhero movies have a history of casting relatively minor Australian actors and watching them blow up – cough, Hugh Jackman, cough. But their pain is Mortal Kombat’s pleasure, for as soon as Josh Lawson takes the stage as Kano, he breathes life into this thing that was truly suffering from some paper-thin characterisation. Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is a terrible character, just because the script doesn’t help him at all – Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) tells him that if they lose this tournament, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) will enslave the entire world and his immediate response is that he wants to fight because Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) threatened his family. Your family, bro? The world, baby! Weren’t you listening? Not only that, I think it’s safe to assume it’s the first time that Young and his family, or any city-dwelling Earthling for that matter, has ever come across a superpowered being with ice powers, so they might want to react to that; all the worse when you’re told that thing is directly targeting your family and all we get from a reactionary point of view, is one line of dialogue from Young that his daughter struggled to get to sleep in the safe house that night. While I’m at it, I don’t remember much emotion coming from Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) when her boo Jax (Mehcad Brooks) never came home either. In Mortal Combat’s defence, it’s clear the movie is on double-speed to get to the action ASAP, with a quest to fit in as many match-ups as possible; that’s its priority. But this movie did make me think back to Transformers; the time and care it took to meld the crazy premise of transforming alien robots into our existence, and I think Mortal Kombat misses the lesson – say what you want about Shia LeBeouf, at least you understood that stumbling across the Transformers intergalactic war was not an ordinary day.
But the action looks sick, and it is impressive how many fighters Mortal Kombat is able to fit into this movie without it feeling bloated or convoluted. When it comes to the blood and gore content, Jurassic Park creator Richard Hammond would be proud because the special effects team have ‘spared no expense’ – Mortal Kombat has saddled up to their R-Rating and loving it. I love it too. Mortal Kombat also features the least hammy live-action villain with a tendency to freeze people that I can recall 😏 Seeing the way Hasashi’s family was frozen, I kept waiting for George Clooney’s Batman to come out of the shadows to tell Commissioner Gordon, ‘you have ten minutes to thaw these people!’ – these are Batman & Robin jokes. But when Jax finds his inner power and his mechanical arms get stronger, I thought of Bart Simpson and came up with ‘arcana makes metal expand, now who’s being naïve’ – that’s a Simpsons joke… I like to have fun.
Mortal Kombat is directed by Simon McQuoid, and features a whole lot of extreme hand-to-hand fighting with the fate of Earth at stake! The dialogue and characterisation are a bit thin. But if they’d fixed that up, it would have been one helluva movie. However, I once got dragged to Dragonball Evolution without knowing the lore for that either, and there’s two sore hours of my life I’ll never get back; Mortal Kombat is nowhere near that.
3.0
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