TEST YOUR MIGHT, Warner Brothers! We live in a world of movie franchises now. So the production company went into their archives and dug out a video game that’s been a teenage favorite for years: Mortal Kombat. The studio sees the enticing recipe possibilities for the video game adaptation and sees $$$$$ for toys, sequels, TV shows, you name it. The serious desire for dollars can be felt all over the “first” movie, with mixed results for the audience, the equivalent of losing over the pit to Sub Zero after a few wins in your video game tournament.
The 2021 version of this movie is an origin story basically. After we get the 1700s backstory of the Sub Zero (Joe Taslim) and Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) generational feud, we fast forward to the present day, where Sub Zero and Shang Tsung’s (Chin Han) Outworld realm is 1 win away in the multi-realm Mortal Kombat tournament from taking over Earth. Cole Young (Lewis Tan) could care less about this, as he is scraping by fighting in underground tournaments to feed his family. But when Sub Zero and Jax (Mechad Brooks) arrive looking for him, Cole finds himself an unwitting competitor, recruited by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to help save Earth from Outworld enslavement.
Warner Brothers really wants Mortal Kombat to succeed; you can see it with the epic scope and hard appeal to fan service. If you’re a fan of characters walking over mountains with beautiful sunsets behind them, this movie has more than a few of those, immediately raising the movie’s importance level by 10 hit points. The cast also has some international heavy hitters: Hiroyuki Sanada is a legend in the Japanese film industry and Joe Taslim has been redefining what an action movie looks like in the 2010s; and they play the big “heavies” in the movie everyone is afraid of. To appeal to the fans of the video game, the movie doesn’t shy away from the game’s hard “R” roots, giving us extremely violent fatalities, some of which are either great in jokes for fans or wonderfully gruesome death scenes. You’ll hear catch phrases, see interesting character origins, and watch Sub Zero take someone’s blood and turn it into a weapon against them (the highlight of the trailer, and unfortunately the movie too: the Taslim/Sanada fight scenes are awesome). Warner Brothers so desperately is rooting for this film to franchise that the money it pumps into the movie can be felt in the script and the direction: this is a serious thing, and the studio wants you to know it’s taking this origin story seriously.
But the tonal choice of deadly importance from the opening scene means this movie veers dangerously close to Batman v Superman territory, sucking the inherent silliness and violent delight out of most of the film. You can’t help but compare this 2021 version of Mortal Kombat to the 1995 version. That earlier movie derived the right mixture from the video game: about 20% of the cast taking the movie seriously, and the other 80% either comic relief or so hilariously serious that they become instant comic relief. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s 1995 Shang Tsung finds the perfect note to play the evil big bad: just chew on that scenery and go crazy power drunk. Just look at what he does in 2 minutes! Chin Han’s version is, because of the 2021 movie’s tone, dialed down and calculated, and Han cannot convey the same level of terrifying silly menace that Tagawa can with those amazing eyeballs, neutering Tsung into a hollow pointless character. Because of that demented silliness of the 1995 version, it made it easier to forgive the cheesy dialogue and paper thin characters. But when you make your movie insistently important, that same cheesy dialogue and terrible character development points out the pandering, manipulative nature of your movie, and makes it way less fun to enjoy. A perfect example? Dark scenes make it easy to show how unhappy and scary the consequences are for the characters, meaning you’re getting many a dark fight scene: so dark in fact I immediately picked up my phone because I couldn’t see ANYTHING. Might help your fighting movie if you could see the characters fight each other, call me crazy.
What results is 2021 Mortal Kombat: the game you are so excited to play entering your name is awesome, but then after a day or two you’d rather play with a cup and ball. I got bored a couple times, but after a few minutes Kano would execute his exquisite fatality on a lizard creature and I’d be sucked back in. I’d watch another one of these if you could get Iko Uwais to play Joe Taslim’s villain in the next one. I could watch those 2 fight all day everyday.