2021’s Mortal Kombat was… fine, I guess? It’s main problems were a distinct lack of tournament fighting and being built around Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, a character new to the franchise. The reason given at the time was that they didn’t want to upset any of the fan base by centering an existing character over others, which is certainly a choice. The effect was that the film spent a lot of time and energy building up Cole – time and energy that could have spent splattering the screen with blood and viscera. This is, after all, Mortal Kombat. The games are notorious for their gruesome fatalities more than anything else – the gore is what we’re here for.
Lessons have been learned, it seems. Mortal Kombat II is almost all mortal combat, with the Earthrealm’s heroes taking on the various henchmen of interdimensional warlord Shao Khan Martin (Martyn Ford) in a series of battles for the whole bag of marbles. Cole Young gets relegated to the supporting cast (Tan has a right to be pissed off bout this development, and he looks it) in favour of Karl Urban‘s Johnny Cage, a washed-up B movie action star plucked from fan convention hell to fight the forces of evil. Meanwhile, we get a parallel storyline with Kitana (Sophia Xu), the daughter of a murdered king that Shao Khan raises as his own daughter, and her bodyguard, Jade (Tati Gabrielle). If that reminds you of Karen Gillan’s Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy, you’re not alone.
Indeed, much of Mortal Kombat II will remind you of other, better movies. It’s an incredibly derivate work, beholden to the the dense, often self-contradictory lore of the franchise. All fights are to the death… until they’re not. Characters die bloodily, but resurrection is always on the cards, which reduces the perceived stakes considerably.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being derivative – it’s okay to play the hits from time to time rather than pushing the boundaries. But you better play those hits well, and Mortal Kombat II does not, which makes its occasional swipes at both 90s direct-to-video action fare and the post-John Wick cinema landscape hubristic as all hell. If you’re going to trash talk the genre, you ought to be making something that’s a cut above the usual. Instead, what we get is perfunctory – the action is just about okay, if you squint a bit. The dialogue is tin-eared and cliched. Cage’s arc from self-doubting louche to world-saving warrior follows the exact path you’d expect it to.
Not that there aren’t bright spots, mind you – chiefly Josh Lawson’s cheerfully profane Kano, clearly ad-libbing for all its worth and bringing a much-needed dose of comedy to the proceedings. Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Joe Taslim show up as Lord Raiden, Scorpion, and Bi-Han, respectively, and it’s always great to see them even when they’re egregiously underused (Taslim, a genuine action superstar, is barely a cameo). If you want gnarly fatalities, you’ll get ’em – but their OTT brutality is weirdly at odds with the fantastical tone of the rest of the film. Ultimately, Mortal Kombat II just makes the grade as a Friday night time killer, but I can’t imagine ever bothering to watch it twice.
Mortal Kombat II is in cinemas now.
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