Mortal Kombat Movie (2021)

The only thing this movie had to do was not be boring. It failed miserably.

@lapsariangiraff said:

So much this. I think it's almost always really stupid when a movie inserts a character so "the audience has someone to relate to." This movie opens with a bunch of fucking ice ninjas killing everyone - you know what kind of movie you're in for in the first five minutes without Cole Onoscopy or whatever his name is holding your hand.

Here's a hint for screenwriters - if the audience can't relate to the characters in the movie, it doesn't mean you need to add another character for context. It just means your script sucks.

@therealturk: To be fair to screenwriters, my understanding is that more often than not fuck ups like this come from a producer or someone higher on the production side. Especially when it comes to nerdy properties like this. Say what you will about Marvel, the reason most of their stuff works for most people is because they don't muck around with stuff that is already popular because of a misguided attempt to make things more mainstream or something.

Man, I feel like this just sums up the movies industry at this point. You had Marvel movies come in and just ravage the entire scene, and now we have a bunch of people trying to copy them with "non-sense" adventure movies and none of them understand why Marvel was so successful.

Cole was an addition from the studio who wanted someone to be 'the new guy' and have everything explained to him (and thus, the audience). He was in the original draft that writer Greg Russo worked from. According to him:

“I inherited a script in 2016, and that had the new protagonist in it,” Russo says. “But it had no tie to the mythology of Mortal Kombat. I thought, if we’re going to do it, I want to make sure we do it right and that this character fits into the mythology in an organic way.”

@sethmode: A LOT of the MCU has been heavily changed from the comics to be less convoluted/stupid/"more accessible" and so forth. And a lot of that flowed back in to the mainline 616 comics over the past decade or so.

Guardians of the Galaxy was kind of a "will this even work?" because up until then they stuck with the safest possible properties and STILL made accessibility changes. One of the more notable ones being the Peggy/Sharon Carter thing. They were clearly experimenting a bit with winter soldier but basically dropped it the moment the audience got REALLY squicked out by Steve kissing the niece of the love of his life in Civil War.

Similarly, Thor's origin and power set was drastically streamlined, they got rid of secret identities almost 100% (Peter is really the only one who even has one?), Ultron and Hank Pym were basically non-entities because of how messed up their histories are, etc. Even Guardians, the most "out there" property drastically simplified almost all the characters with special mention going to Drax basically losing his entire incredibly convoluted and weird history.

The reason Marvel did it so much better is because they have been doing that for decades. Every few years it seems they launch what DC would call an "elseworlds" title that basically spins up a new universe where they can retell the more popular stories, ignore the less liked ones, and more or less experiment. The Ultimate Universe (1610?) being an example of one of the best "new takes" ever (Ultimate Spider-Man is god tier and probably the best Peter ever was AND gave us Miles) AND one of the absolute worst ("The A doesn't stand for France"...).

And for as wild and out there as Guardians is/was: The main character is a kid from Earth who is obsessed with Earth media and basically every single character's backstory was drastically simplified and streamlined. It is still bonkers compared to Captain America but it is nothing like the guardians of the comics were (a lot like they are NOW though). It is just that Peter Quill was a "real" character when he was acting as our POV character to walk us through the cosmic MCU and going into detail to explain each new species and concept. Rather than sitting there with a stupid look on his face.

MK have tried that over the years whether it is the movies/tv shows or even the games themselves doing a reboot to try to clean up continuity. I remember a lot of people HATED the machinima series a few years (decade?) back and I still don't understand what it is that makes comics fans more willing to allow The Holy Canon to be edited.

That being said: Holy shit Cole sucked.

They should've called this Mortal Fuckin' Kombat. What a trash script! Not even fun in a bad way, just grating and pointless. Bummer.

With no shame I can say i'm a big fan of the Mortal Kombat lore and this movie sucks. They basically made MK into My Hero Academia where everyone gets a quirk. The self insert new character is bland as fuck. The characters saying lines from the games does not fit at any point.

Boooooooo Warner Brothers, Boooooooooo.

I will probably be in the minority here but I thought it was just alright but MK '95 is still the best one. This is at least much more watchable compared to MK: Annihilation and the MK: Conquest Tv show.

I'm surprised that no one talked about how well the special effects were done... especially with Kabal and Mileena.

Hopefully when a sequel is greenlit, they'll do better with the overall tone and pace of the film.

The main character Cole had the charisma of a volcanic rock.

Scorpion and Sub-Zero were nice, but thats about it.

The whole thing felt super meh. I just kept checking how much longer I had to go wondering when the actual tournament was gonna happen

While this movie was generally not great, I did enjoy all the scenes with Kano. I laughed more than I was expecting.

Thought it was decent enough.

I was so excited for this movie and so let down. The tone was so all over the place, the characters so boring, and the plot so slight. I didn't go in expecting anything big. Just looking for a fun fighting movie, but the only characters worth watching were Kano and Scorpion. Everyone else had zero charisma and nothing to add. Why would you create a whole new character? You have dozens of amazing people to choose from with so many interesting back stories. Even the villains were boring and uninteresting in plot. The original movie oozed personality and had fun with it and still managed to have an interesting plot. How in the world do you not even have Johnny Cage? The main guy had no personality, his back story was garbage and he was a total Mary Sue. Goro was badass, Kano was chewing the scenery every time and the plot of Scorpion and sub zero was the only good bit of writing in the whole movie. It was slow, boring and had the worst climax. Seeing the fatalities and hearing catch phrases was fun but didn't lift it out of the garbage heap the rest of the film was. Also the vfx were not great and I do that for a living and am typically very understanding of rushed fx.

Going in I expected a dumb movie with a great fights and I got better than I expected. It's no masterpiece, but I liked the story overall. The main protag being on OC was a bad decision, but is par for the course so I guess that didn't bother me as much. Most of the fights were great, some a bit cheesy in points but I appreciated the nod to the source material.

The 2.5 things that really bummed me out is 1) the music was terrible, the MK theme hits once or twice briefly but then goes back to boring MCU-style backing music. 2) the actual Mortal Kombat tournament isn't even in the movie, this was the worst case of Part 1 movie I've seen in a really long time. I did not realize going in that this was basically setup to be the first of 2+ movies and was not happy about that. 2.5) the ending scene just soured the whole experience because of how obvious it was saying "just wait for the sequel!"

All that said, I still think the movie was good. I know a bunch of people will disagree, but to me it's better than the original movie overall so I'm happy.

I enjoyed it. It was silly but fun. I agree that I wish it was a Scorpion vs Sub-Zero film or something as that seems way more interesting, but, I enjoyed my time with it 🤷

It would have been better if they made Liu Kang or Sonya the actual main character and did away with the Cole dude. The costumes were good and has some fun action. Got more than a few laughs out of Kano. Totally fine dumb action flick. The editing was a bit messy at times. Seemed like a reasonable B action movie.

Subzero was pretty sick.

It’s a totally ok movie, Kano was really the highlight though

The most 7 to 8/10 movie I’ve seen in a while,

But just some weird choices with the plot, not to mention no scene gets a chance to breathe, as it feels like every major plot point lasts a minute and they REALLY REALLY REALLY should’ve told people this was basically a prequel as it would’ve gone a long way to manage expectations

Cole was ok, his power he got is about the most out of place thing for mortal kombat though.

That being said, I am optimistic about future sequels,

Yeah it was pretty dumb.

I’m fine with some language, but every other fuckin word out of Kano’s fuckin mouth being “fuck” got a bit fuckin annoying.

The characters getting their powers via montage or getting really mad (or something) was silly, especially Jax (“I went grrrrr and my robot arms rebuilt themselves!”).

Nowhere near as fun or good silly as MK 95. Big letdown.

The recent game’s story mode cinematics have been a better movie than this movie. Total disappointment. (But honestly I have no idea how you make a Mortal Kombat movie anymore that wouldn’t be.)

This was definitely a movie made in South Australia. Boring as hell and if it wasn’t for the mouthy Australian it wouldn’t be worth sticking around.

Main notes -

- Cole was a waste of time as a character

- Liu Kang could have been acted by a cardboard cutout from the game and been a better performance

- Sub Zero and Scorpion fucking slap but they also seem to be the only two actors they didn’t pull off the street in Rundle Street Mall

- Kano. Motherfuckin Kano.

- “Well these motherfuckers work.”

@gundato: This was a lot of, quite frankly, unnecessary words seemingly arguing with me over something I never said. Obviously things aren't 1 to 1 with the comics, but part of what makes Marvel so successful is that they largely do their best to stick to the source material. This isn't some outlandish, unique opinion that I alone have?

Regardless, the fact remains, this movie takes all of the wrong lessons from the MCU and unnecessarily changes things in ways that are just silly. Cole doesn't need to exist. It would have been just as easy to make the character a Chinese-American Johnny Cage.

There are things this movie does well, but it falls apart under even minor analytical stress.

I feel like in MK'95, treated its audience like idiots but also explicitly spelled out each of the main characters' arcs: Liu has to stop focusing on revenge, Sonya has to rely on someone besides herself, and Cage has to learn to care beyond just himself.

What is the arc of the MC in MK'21? I don't feel like he undergoes any kind of growth. His transformation occurs...

And hey, that's not always a negative on its own - sometimes in a martial arts/mythology/superhero flick, it's the rest of the cast that changes as a result of their interaction with the hero. But I also don't feel like any other character's arc benefits from his presence.

There were no characters in this movie. There was no story. And worst of all, the fight choreography was incredibly weak. MK 11 did a much better job of... just about everything.

Nothing about this movie worked for me. A script that feels picked apart by executives, overall dull and poor acting performances across the board, most of the wardrobe looked liked halloween costumes. Tonally the movie shifts back and forth from feeling like a modern film to an early 00's resident evil movie. I hated it.

@sethmode: Well, here I was about to give you even more examples of the MCU changing "source material" to be more approachable for an audience but I would truly hate to burden you with even more unnecessary words.

I deeply apologize

It's a decent watch. Can tell the budget is low but they seem to get the most out of it. Some solid enough performances with the likes of Kano, Sub Zero and Scorpion standing out (props to Sonya for selling the exposition that she's saddled with. Certainly a thankless job. She'salso a low key better part of this movie). Solid fights and good kills.

Wouldn't mind more of these films with a bigger budget. Not sure why there's so much shade in here. Seems like people set thier expectations into the stratosphere needlessly.

Watching it in an hour with my brother, all these thoughts on it does not bode well for my up coming 90 minutes. At least i have some beer and shelf of whiskey.

@noobsauce Not sure if it's entirely "shade" as much as it is just something that didn't work for some folks? I know that there is some weird, "MK can't be this" gatekeeping going on with this that is bullshit for sure. I feel the need to clarify my stance a little because of that.

It's entirely fine that they made an MK movie with this modern movie template, and that maybe people find it to be a very fun entry into the franchise. I feel like it's less of a question of whether or not what they are doing works and more for some of us how creatively uninteresting it is. If you don't watch a lot of the modern superhero action fare, I'm sure it probably comes across far less saturated. But I look to people praising the Kano role as an example of the disconnect for me. The moment he showed up on screen I uttered out loud "Are we really going to Loki Kano here?" Sure enough? Yuuuup.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a fun rompy action adventure with some Sam Raimi style over the top gore as an MK movie. The audience that is being served with this are absolutely in the right to enjoy it to their hearts content. But there is also nothing wrong with people being critical of that on the grounds that every other movie coming out now is following this template/formula, and because of that are a little bummed. Like one of the things I see posted in this thread several times, and have seen on the web is this idea that some people are upset that the movie wasn't A+ script writing and Oscar material.

Which like baffles me because that isn't at all why I was disappointed with the film. It wasn't campy enough, it wasn't stylish enough, it tried to have way more substance than I felt an MK movie needed. The last thing I want is some prestige arthouse classic out of this franchise. It's just if your even remotely keeping up with where the genre of movie this MK is making is at, it's not doing anything particular fresh at all. It's another one of those. If you haven't seen enough of that, and the MK skins are enough to push that home for you? Great, have fun.

I thought it took itself way too seriously. Why would you try to make a movie based on Mortal Kombat of all things a serious movie? They should have made a dumb movie on purpose and had fun, instead of making a dumb movie on accident and looking stupid.

It's also kind of wild to read the screenwriter give a quote like this:

It takes a lot of time to figure things out, to find the right direction for the movie, and we wanted to do it right. We really did use almost all of [that time]. There were no periods where I would just disappear from the project. We were just working on different drafts and different versions and trying to find the right tone of it.

And reconcile that with what transpired on the screen. I wouldn't have been surprised if the writing and filming of this movie had taken two weeks and the rest of its production schedule was taken up by a random accessory of small VFX houses.

@devise22: I think @matthewgm hit the nail on the head. There was no character development and nobody is different for having been involved in any of this. The closest you can get is that Cole learned it is important to fight back rather than be a human punching bag? Which he was for some reason?

But I think there is definitely some weird obsession with "protecting" the MK canon. We have... eloquent... people talking about how other media adaptations don't have to change anything so neither should MK which is laughable to begin with but even moreso when we literally just had a trilogy of MK games that was a glorified retcon/reboot. And I definitely remember a lot of the same insistence on purity when Jax was Michael Jai White and Johnny was a power ranger who became Casper van Dien.

And yeah. I mostly found it fine but not good. But I kind of got the feeling it was leaning in to the "so bad it is good" which made it a lot more coherent and entertaining than Annihilation. But it also never went far enough with that.

I also kind of wonder how far in to production they were when the "arcana" concept got added. I can totally see someone glancing at the script and seeing a sequence where Jax gets his arms ripped off (as he does), going to a military facility, getting new arms, and going to fight the bad guys. And someone saying "That exact sequence was in MK Annihilation and that movie was trash". You can sort of see that with Kano taking a pretty nasty face injury from Reptile and the likelihood of that becoming a metal plate with a laser eye (and I want to say the trailers showed it from a weird angle that would have hidden the plate?) and the monks not needing any level ups. So the training/bonding montage became a power up montage. Could also see similar thoughts with "Hey, Notebook girl and Jimmy Olsen are actually okay actors. Let's keep using them rather than just ignoring them until we need someone to kill a girl villain" also contributing to the "everyone should discover their powers" bullshit.

And I think that with even minimal tweaks it could have worked. The arcanas are so stupid that I am personally fine with it and just lampshading it a bit more when they unlocked would have done the trick. And maybe it is just Warrior and going down a Bruce Lee rabbithole but I would have loved it if the reason Cole takes a beating is that he was mma->movie star who got disillusioned with the entire world thinking "You are japanese so you can fight". Maybe show some racist asshole in the audience right before Cole doesn't do "The Uppercut" and loses. Have a quick fight with Jax where he shows he CAN kick insane amounts of ass but chooses to hold back (maybe with an inkling of his powers showing up because Jax pissed him off) and his big moment is letting loose to protect his family. Play up his heritage in that he always had his arcana but chose not to use it. AND that would tie in great for Johnny Cage in the sequel.

I've seen a lot of people including myself get the actress for Sonya wrong. It is not Rachel McAdams or " The Notebook girl." The actress' name is Jessica McNamee. Figured I'd clear that up for folks.

Well that was surely a waste o 90 minutes, most of you guys where right on the money. So much lost potential.

This is a bad movie by most standards but it's not as awful as a lot of people seem to be saying. It's a cheap b-tier action flick in most ways, and it's competently shot, mostly competently acted, with some decent fights and passable special effects for a lower budget project.

The real weakness is the script, which is legitimately one of the worst I've ever seen put into an actual movie.

The script fundamentally misunderstands the source material. I don't mean that it fails to copy the story of the games, which is fine, but it doesn't seem to understand what Mortal Kombat is. Instead it takes some of the trappings of Mortal Kombat like characters and the idea of a tournament and tries to turn it into a conventional 3 act Hollywood screenplay, and completely and utterly fails to do so.

The 1995 movie worked not because of Johnny Cage, as some people have suggested here, but because of Raiden. In that movie all the fighters got together with Raiden as their guide and they would ask him questions and he would just start laughing inappropriately or say something weird and move past it and everyone would shrug and go on because things were weird and they were fighting for their lives. They used Raiden to handwave the whole stupid backstory and get on with the tournament, filling in a few tidbits here and there through entertaining conversations with weird characters and a lot of tension. This worked reasonably well.

This movie is like "hold on a second with your tournament thing, we gotta explain...everything." So it focuses way too much on giving us backgrounds and character arcs for characters who are still one note by the end of the movie. It's a bunch of origin stories for characters who are barely characters to begin with.

Nobody cares how the Mortal Kombat characters got their powers. HOw did Sub-Zero learn to control ice? He's a badass ninja, next question. How did Liu Kang get fireballs and his dragon kicks? He's a Shaolin monk and they have cool powers, next question.

Showing the characters before they got their powers and then going into Arcana and all that mumbo jumbo is just a total waste of time and has no stakes or tension (will the main character find out that he too has Mortal Kombat powers? You'd have to be brain dead not to know the answer.)

So we get this long drawn out sequence where everybody comes together and none of the characters we're following know what's going on, and then these training sequences, and it's all a bunch of throat clearing. It's shot fine, and acted okay, but it's boring and completely without stakes.

The outworld characters, meanwhile, get no development whatsoever. The movie doesn't even explain why Scorpion and Sub-Zero hate each other. That's fine, I guess, but not when the rest of the movie is obsessed with explaining everything. I know that when I watch a Mortal Kombat movie I really want to know the intricacies of Kung Lao and Liu Kang's relationship. None of this dumb ninja conflict stuff, how come Kung Lao's ancestor was a monk but he had kids? Can we get a breakdown of the rules of their order?

Meanwhile the dialog is all garbage tier with a lot of horrible one-liners that don't land at all. Fan Service is fine, but when your movie's tone is "dead serious" you don't need someone saying "flawless victory" after they kill someone.

They never should have shot this script. There was no way to make it work as written. It also seems like they ran out of budget and had to cram the whole third act into like a 10 minute montage. The end of this movie feels like a student frantically scribbling an ending to her essay right before she turns it in at the deadline.

On the plus side if they make a sequel it could be much better if they get new writers. They can leave the directors and most of the actors in place. Though they need more women. Mortal Kombat has a really strong cast of female characters and there are 5 female characters of note in the movie, 2 of them are just relatives of the main character and 2 of them are just outworld fodder with like 5 total lines between them. Sonya gets a lot of screen time but her dialog is the worst of all, especially her horrible exposition dump when she's first introduced.

It's far from the worst movie ever made, and probably in the top half of video game movies, but it's really bad unless you're just watching for the fight scenes in which case it's pretty average.

sColepion was a bit of a dud but my friends and I thought the movie was fine! It really moves at a breakneck speed though. You barely get a moment of calm in the entire 110 minute runtime.

I thought the liberties they took with the canon were kind of interesting, since I'm not hugely protective or aware of all the nuances of the established game canon.

Honestly surprised to see as much hate on the film as I'm seeing, I really enjoyed the hell out of it!

Not sure it necessarily told a good story, but I just enjoyed seeing some characters I love being portrayed and performed well in a live action setting.

Also just as a glimpse into this version of the MKverse, I think it's a lot of fun!

Could not give less of a fuck about Cole though, which obviously dampens things a bit, but I found it easy to look past and just appreciate the world and the characters.

@thekreep: It's not just the "story" that's bad. Every part of the script is awful. It's a script full of one liners and they're all awful. The closest you can come to a character with any...character...is Kano, and that's mostly down to a campy performance rather than the actual dialog. Character actions make zero sense.

Cole knows that the outworlders are tracking down all the people with marks and killing everyone in the vicinity so he...goes home to his family to put them directly in harm's way after he initially left them in the cabin precisely to draw the assassins away from them?

The heroes strategy at the end is "we are overpowered as a group so we should take them on one on one" which makes no sense to begin with because if you're outmatched you'd want the numbers on your side, and also they lost all the one on one fights they had during the attack, except for Kung Lao, who is dead. And it's not even explained how they get to Outworld for some of the ambushes because the whole third act of the film is stuffed into like 10 minutes.

Jax's Arcana is that his pre-installed cyberarms get a makeover. Cole's is that...he gets armor and weapons he can summon from nowhere and he becomes totally invincible (they didn't even do the incredibly obvious moment where Cole gets his magic armor penetrated in order to raise the stakes, and instead just outsourced the final battle to a character we had not seen since the beginning of the movie, which is maybe the worst writing I've ever seen in a Hollywood film.)

Everyone else has this convoluted backstory as to how they unlocked their Arcana. Sonya kills Kano and then the next time we see her she's shooting her pink blasts for some reason, when there's no reason to do it there and you lose a moment from the next movie where she gains the power and she's already had her big climatic battle so it is nothing but pure fan service that undermines the whole stupid idea you've based your dumb script around.

Kano meets Kabal, a guy who hates him and who he betrayed, and Kabal offers him limitless money if he betrays his current friends and Kano's like "Yeah, this dude who hates me is totally on the up and up, I should do that" AND IT WORKS OUT FINE. Of course Kano trusted Sonya too for some reason even though he says that her offer makes no sense, which I guess works if you're portraying Kano as literally the dumbest man alive, but does raise the question of how he ever became head of the Black Dragon to begin with when he has an IQ of 4.

Sonya tells Cole, who she literally just met and has said 10 words to, that she doesn't have the money to pay Kano, because of course a trained spec-ops soldier instatrusts every random person they meet with important secret information. This is done in service of a one liner so bad that I legitimately felt terrible for the actress. I felt bad for her through the whole movie because of the horrible dialog they gave her.

And that's just some of the problems with the script outside the fact that the dialog is all terrible, that they abandon the premise of Mortal Kombat to bring out their own moronic idea that adds nothing to anything, etc...

If all you wanted from this movie was to see Sub-Zero freeze dudes and Scorpion throw his spear and Kung Lao's razor hat etc... then yeah, it served that purpose. The action was mostly okay, the sets were cheap but not falling down, it wasn't a disaster in every area like an Uwe Boll movie. A lot of talented professionals worked on it. I don't even think the cast was particularly bad. They weren't given anything to work with, but does Jax seem Jaxy and Sonya seem like Sonya? Sure. Part of the reason nobody likes Cole is because there's no pre-existing character to fanservice there, since our pre-existing ideas about these characters are what drive our acceptance of them since the movie does nothing to develop them, with the possible exception of Liu Kang.

And that's fine. It's a Mortal Kombat movie. Maybe you just wanted some decent CG fireballs and a laser-eye and call it a day. I can dig that, especially if you already had an HBO Max subscription so it's free. But I don't understand how anyone could watch this movie with its horrific script and be confused about why other people didn't like it.

For as slow as this movie felt watching, characters outside of the main few weren't given any room to breathe at all. Every encounter the fighters had with each other were so bland and quick you hardly got anything out of it.

For as movie based on a fighting game, the fighting was surprisingly dull.

@sethmode: “Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Goro”

@spacemanspiff00: Yeah, it’s a bit wild people thought they could have got someone like Rachel McAdams to be in this type of movie.

I mean, you answered yourself. It gets back to the "its a mortal kombat movie, what did you expect?" comments

Its very much a low B movie and... that is probably all it really needed to be. Don't get me wrong, I want more. But there is "wow, that kind of really sucked" and "Wow, that is the worst movie I ever saw" kind of reactions. The latter making me simultaneously envy and pity people who have not watched anywhere near as much trash as I have.

Like, it is REALLY not a good movie. But it had its entertaining moments and at least stayed amusing even when it was laughably bad. Compared to something like a Bright or even Godzilla vs Kong, that is good enough for me. I am not going to go out of my way to watch this but if I am ever in a hotel room and it is on HBO or even TBS, I'll leave it on. And I'll probably watch the sequel and be disappointed by that too.

@ithas2besaidkvo:Rachel McAdams was in Dr Strange, the RDJ Sherlock movies, and at least one Rob Schneider film. Don't be saying her shit don't stink, heh

That being said: In my defense I knew she was not Mcnamee. But I thought they were both in The Notebook. Apparently instead they are both in The Vow which I THINK was basically the same movie?

@gundato: People calling this the worst movie ever are just engaging in typical hyperbole. It's not even the worst Mortal Kombat movie, let alone the worst video game movie. Uwe Boll movies were worse in more or less every way. There's no way Boll could stage an action sequence like the first fight...or any of the fights in this movie. Every actor in this movie puts in a better performance than any actor in an Uwe Boll movie, even though actors like Jason Statham and Christian Slater are clearly more talented in a raw sense than most of these people. Boll had the ability to turn straw into mud. You watch Slater in Alone in the Dark and then you watch what he did earlier and what he did after and you come to the conclusion that Boll must be some kind of anti-Midas.

But I think it's easy to understand that for some people they just want to see the characters they know with some special effects, and others were hoping for a somewhat coherent movie with a fun tone. The second group are justifiably disappointed, and the first group are happy because, hey, we get to see Raiden throw some lightning and that's what they wanted.

This is the correct reaction.

Film Crit Hulk, who for my money, always has a keen eye for problems with screenplay structure, just put out a great piece on the new Mortal Kombat. I agree with this wholeheartedly.

The issue isn't wanting a gritty, Oscar-winning MK. It's that this doesn't even work as pulpy fun the way the original film did.

I wasn't going to watch this but the Bombcast seemed kind of positive so I gave it a shot and yah, it's ehh pretty bad. There were maybe like 3 sequences total that were fine but overall what a waste of time.

I liked it. But I wasn’t expecting anything. I expected bad and I got bad with amazing cgi.

The main character is confusingly bad (like... why? How?) and everything happens way too fast like they were told to cut 30 minutes from the script, but the VFX department knocked it out of the park. Sub-Zero’s ice is photoreal, Jax’s big boy arms are completely cgi (did you think they were practical fx?), and even Arnold Shwarzegoro looked okay, although he was the weakest cgi by a mile.

Also I enjoyed the Liu Kang leg sweep joke. That felt like a deep cut to me and it made me smile.

6/10 I hope they kill off Cole and make a sequel that has 50%-75% more fighting.