Mortal Kombat (2021)
A fun mess
In 1992 my parents took me to an Arcade at the edge of my of my town, Independence and Kansas City. There, amid the noise, flashing lights, and smell of stale pizza was the cabinet for a game of the likes I had never seen before. The joystick was already smeared with grease, the cabinet window a plastic sheaf with these concentric circle ridges that textured the screen; behind which lit up a gory rotoscoped blue ninja artfully (and with all the squishy detail), decapitating identical yellow ninja as 32 bit blood dripped down the oddly white spine and the words FATALITY flashing on the screen in a dripping red impact font.
It is impossible to separate Mortal Kombat (2021) from being a young kid in the 90s standing on cheap green short strand carpet, shoving quarters into a simulated murder machine, and trying to find the exact pattern and pace of movements and jumps that made the screen go black and your character perform unspeakable acts of violence on a palette swapped version of himself. Luckily Mortal Kombat evokes that feeling strong enough to carry it through its 84 minute run time.
The story, such as it is, follows an ostensibly original character, Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan, a down on his luck MMA fighter and family man, whom after an assassination attempt from a masked man in a blue samurai suit who can control ice, Cole is brought into a small team hunting for people with a peculiar birthmark the Cole happens to possess. And from there they go on an Odyssey to locate the Temple of Raiden, an ancient Storm God, where hopefully they will finally find the point of the movie.
This is the speed for about a full half of the run time. Starting off as a Kurisawa-esque Samurai revenge story for the first 10 minutes to set up a lineage for the story, then pivoting into a kind of Rocky/Rudy sports story about a fighter down on his luck, and then wheeling around into a conspiracy Lore thriller ala Skull Island until finally settling down into a Superhero team up movie, all while interspersed with shorts scenes of Ng Chin Han gloriously chewing the poorly rendered CGI scenery.
It seems that Mortal Kombat wanted to be 5 different movies, when honestly it could have settled on being one: Blood Sport. Just remake Blood Sport, but this time have Sonya Blade doing kickflips and the people already sold on the idea from word Mortal are going to watch it. In the way Warner Brothers made this movie, they come perilously close to having to expose an unwilling audience Mortal Kombat's lore, a mind-numbingly over convoluted mess of barely distinguishable realms and splits timelines that come from needing a narrative justification of why the big dude in the skull face keeps coming back when I killed his ass three games ago.
Despite the seeming overstuffing of the plot structure, and the over tuned structural editing of the piece, there is still long stretches of the movie in which not much is actually happening and we're left relying on the strength of the characters to carry us through it, something Mortal Kombat struggles with because the original characters were little more than two dimensional sprites swapped between three body models, and the fact that our protagonist is just boring doesn't actually help matters. His story, which plays out like The Matrix by way of Highlander, just can't capture my attention long enough to carry me through the story. His plot beats are predictable and lazy, as if the screen writer took Hero With A Thousand Faces, copy pasted the text into the script, and edited to include characters from a 30 year old violence simulator for over sugared minors.
Where the movie picks up is in its action scenes, which is just as gory and indulgent as the games that bear its name. If you're watching to see Subzero tear a man's arms off, or Kung Lao saw someone in half with his hat, you will not be disappointed. The director is also very conscientious on including as many references, catch phrases, and locations to make a lifelong fan boy squeal with glee. And credit to it, I did squeal with glee. But I have to just wonder what it must look like to a person who has never played Mortal Kombat to watch the guy in the funny hat turn to the camera and announce "Flawless Victory." In a poe faced seriousness and grandeur reserved for action trailers about a trained navy seal getting back his kidnapped dog.
Come to think of it, a lot of the movie is very grandiose. They take very seriously the inherent silliness of the premise, and this is something I respect from it. It knows what it is, but it isn't so insecure as to have to keep reminding me of exactly how silly it is that SubZero has ice powers from a magic birthmark. Rather it powers through it with the delivery of Brian Blessed performing a Shakespearean Sonnet. It is incredible in its absurdity, and where it leans into it is funnest parts of the movie.
Overall, I did enjoy Mortal Kombat, it is very much a movie for fans but likely no one else but fans. While it does drag in places where it expects you to be invested in characters and backstory and not just patiently waiting for Scorpion to finally show up again, where it delivers, it delivers well. It's well choreographed, most of the cast seem to be having a blast, and so did I.
7/10
