MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) Review
It’s the year 2021 and we’re now 26 years removed from the first time the Mortal Kombat franchise found its way on the big screen, of course courtesy of a movie directed by Paul W.S Anderson that MK fans *mostly* have fond, nostalgic love for. While Anderson has continued playing around in the world of video game adaptations, releasing the incredibly fun Monster Hunter just a few short months ago, he has long since moved completely away from the Mortal Kombat brand, with Simon McQuoid finding himself in the director’s chair for the franchise’s big screen return. And by his side, horror fans were pleased to learn, is James Wan as producer.
Not all that unlike the 1995 film, McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat once again depicts the battle between the benevolent Earthworld and the evil Outworld, with Outworld one tournament victory away from taking over Earthworld for good. In order to ensure victory before the next fighting tournament even begins, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) orders the forces of Outworld to vanquish all Earthworld fighters; including MMA grappler Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a brand new central character for this tale. A convoluted battle for the universe ensues, with many of the franchise’s classic characters in the mix.
The one main thing that sets Mortal Kombat 2021 apart from Mortal Kombat 1995 is that the new movie is very much rated “R,” and therefore inherently more true to the violence level in the games. This is made immediately clear in the opening ten minutes of McQuoid’s movie, which establish the centuries-long battle between the video game franchise’s two most iconic fighters: Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Played by Joe Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada, who both instantly add a sense of gravitas that’s otherwise lacking from the rest of the movie, Sub-Zero and Scorpion have a rich history that serves as an anchor for the whole story, with a flashback to the past bringing character depth and brutally violent action to the table right out of the gate. If you’re wondering why Warner Bros. made the decision to release the opening scene a few days early, well, that’s because it’s this movie at its best.
From there we catch up with Cole Young and track his journey to Lord Raiden’s (Tadanobu Asano) temple, joining up with Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) along the way. All of the actors certainly look the part of their video game counterparts but bring very little in the form of charisma to the table, and that problem with miscasting similarly rears its head when it comes time to introduce various other players down the road. As the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Kano, Josh Lawson is the scene-stealer of the group, even if his penchant for cutting into every scene with a joke eventually wears thin; especially once Kano’s “jokes” become racist jabs directed at the international cast of characters. But he’s working with what he’s got to work with, and Lawson’s Kano feels alive in a way the other characters don’t.
Kano’s shenanigans aside, McQuoid mostly takes his Mortal Kombat movie seriously, an approach to the video game material that works best in the aforementioned opening scene but ultimately serves to suck the life out of the proceedings. Whereas Paul W.S. Anderson was having fun with Mortal Kombat back in the 1990s, the team here takes that “grounded in reality” approach that’s become so popular in Hollywood, a directive that insists there’s very little color or video game-like visual flair present in the finished product. From the character outfits to the various locations, Mortal Kombat 2021 is a decidedly flat movie on a visual level, with the iconic costumes totally devoid of color and even Outworld looking much the same as, well, Earthworld. Which is to say, they’re both desert-like locales with little in the form of visual pop, hardly even distinguishable from one another.
There are moments of over-the-top fun in the film, to be sure, and they mostly come in the form of brutal Fatalities that feel impressively true to the games. This version of Mortal Kombat isn’t messing around when it comes time to dispatch characters, with bodies gruesomely maimed in ways that would make Jason Voorhees jealous. The blood is often computer-generated, unfortunately, but enough of the red stuff is spilled across the screen that most gore-hounds will hardly even notice or care. Mortal Kombat 2021 absolutely comes to life when it’s mimicking the graphic style of the games, with characters uttering lines like “Fatality” and “Flawless Victory” in the wake of their bloody murders. And though the film ultimately wastes a few of the big fights with uncommonly dull Fatalities, there’s enough bloodshed present in the movie to win over anyone who’s mostly there for the gore.
And the gang is (mostly) all here in Mortal Kombat 2021, with Greg Russo and Dave Callaham’s script packing in as many of the popular characters as it can. In addition to the previously mentioned characters, big names like Mileena (Sisi Stringer), Kung Lao (Max Huang), Kabal (Daniel Nelson) and a computer-generated Goro are in the mix, the film overstuffed with fighters to make sure fans are getting everyone they love. It’s an issue that was naturally going to be inherent to this movie, but there’s all around just too much going on here and too many characters at play for any of their individual stories to really shine. Again, it’s Sub-Zero and Scorpion who get the most character spotlight and shine the brightest as a result, with Taslim’s Sub-Zero coming off as a truly menacing villain and Sanada’s Scorpion brought to the screen as a well-realized hero worth rooting for.
As for everyone else, well, it’s mostly an over-crowded affair that ensures they exist in the movie but bring little else to the table beyond their general presence. It doesn’t help matters that much of the movie isn’t up to much at all, with the various characters sitting around at Lord Raiden’s temple and essentially… waiting. Waiting for the tournament to begin, and waiting for their Kombat powers to activate. It’s an origin story approach to the material that renders the movie far more dull than a Mortal Kombat movie should ever be, coming to life in brief and violent spurts but otherwise settling for being a drab affair that does little with the rich lore and mythology of the franchise, telling a barebones story that offers no surprises along the way. The Mortal Kombat games have in recent years been telling some pretty great stories of their own, and it’s a bummer to see the movie franchise’s return fall so flat.
Like all big-budget franchise movies from Hollywood these days, one of Mortal Kombat’s biggest goals is to set the stage for future installments, and while that’s only natural for a franchise with endless lore and characters to tap into, the bummer here is that I can’t say I have all that much interest in a Mortal Kombat 2 at this point. The surviving characters left standing at the end of the movie are hardly a compelling bunch; it’s not so much that the movie doesn’t have time to make us love the characters but rather it simply fails to use its time wisely. By the time composer Benjamin Wallfisch’s new take on the classic Mortal Kombat theme plays us out, I found myself more hungry to go back and play the games than watch another attempt to translate them to the big screen. In many ways it feels like we’re already in need of another do-over, and that’s not a sentence I hoped to be writing today.
Mortal Kombat delivers the gore, but it could’ve been so much more.
