The abject silliness of Mortal Kombat cannot be overstated. Born in the krucible of the early-90s arcade and console wars, MK is a franchise of gnarly fistfights and graphic fatalities, wrapped in the ridiculous premise of a hand-to-hand fighting tournament to decide the fate of the world. This made the original a convenient scapegoat for parents and politicians alike, blaming all the ills of society on a game where an ice ninja pulls his opponent’s spine out. Regardless, that only made the game a sensation, a legend among a certain subset of 90s kids who could only hear about these things secondhand from older, cooler kids.
A feature film soon followed: Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat, quite possibly the single most 90s film ever made.1 Then a sequel, a Saturday morning cartoon, a late-night basic cable series, comic books, action figures, and a loooong running video game series, whose expanded lore and roster of characters made the original game look positively quaint.
It’s no secret that the whole enterprise has a thin veneer of 90s-style casual racism baked in. It’s mostly of the “whitebread American idea of ninjas” variety that was part and parcel with the 80s/90s trend of marketing ninja stuff to kids2. The original film really leaned hard into it because, frankly, the series hadn’t yet invented all the nonsense that would allow them to shy away from ideas like “Mortal Kombat is a central tenet of an ancient Chinese religion”. Hell, the original film was shot on location at a Buddhist temple in Thailand, but the title card blatantly calls it “The Chinese Temple of Light”. Even as a 10-year-old, I had seen enough travelogues to go, “I don’t think that’s what China looks like”.
Simon McQuiod’s 2021 feature reboot of the MK franchise holds a particularly weird spot in this writer’s heart. When COVID shut down the entire world in March of 2020, I didn’t know if I’d ever get to see a movie in theaters ever again. The last movie I saw theatrically pre-COVID was Brahms: The Boy II, a horror sequel so flat and meritless that there’s literally no other way I would ever remember it. It would be fourteen months before I was able to go back to the movies, and Mortal Kombat was there to welcome me back.
Warner Bros made the decision to release MK on HBO Max in May of 2021, which is where I first watched it. It’s okay as far as video game movies go; plays fast and loose with the lore, concocts dumb excuses for the characters to have magic powers, doesn’t even make it to the tournament that the film is named after… Oh, and they felt the need to invent a brand new audience-insert hero for the cast to explain everything to, even though there’s already one built into the franchise.
Mortal Kombat is truly nothing special, but it went over like gangbusters in the theater. I enjoyed it much more on a big screen, though I’m fully willing to admit that’s probably just residual good vibes from being in a theater again in the first place. (Rewatching it in preparation for Mortal Kombat II brought back those original “Oh yeah, this is definitely a piece of shit” vibes.
YEAH, YEAH WHATEVER. TELL US ABOUT MK II ALREADY.
Anyway, MK ends with a tease that we’ll be meeting Johnny Cage in the sequel, which feels like a weird bit of fan service considering a) he should’ve been the star of the movie in the first fucking place, and b) this guy was a joke character from the beginning.
Mortal Kombat II finally gets down to the business of the whole ‘cosmic tournament to decide the fate of the Earth’ angle that the first film only teased at. It’s still wild to me that the first film never actually made it to the tournament. That’s the entire point of Mortal Fucking Kombat! Imagine if the original Space Jam spent ninety minutes on the Looney Tunes trying to recruit Michael Jordan, only to end with the tease that the basketball game would have to wait until Space Jam 2.
Now I’ve already wasted too much wordspace, so let’s get down to brass tacks: If you enjoyed Mortal Kombat (2021) at all, you’re going to love the shit out of Mortal Kombat II. If you’re like me, and you’ve loved Mortal Kombat (1995) since you were 10? You might feel very conflicted, because as a pure translation of the games, this might actually be the best Mortal Kombat movie. It’s certainly the most Mortal Kombat movie. The 1995 film has tons of ridiculous, nostalgic charm for weirdo 90s kids (guilty), but being an adult also means recognizing how chintzy and sparse a lot of that film is.
This new one, though? This is the maximalist opus of Mortal Kombat films we’ve been hoping to see for over thirty years. It’s a hilarious mixed bag of goofy comedy, cool sci-fi characters, dimension-hopping weirdness, and no-name actors trying their best against some truly outlandish costuming and make-up effects, all wrapped in a movie that constantly waffles between PG-13 silliness and gruesome X-rated gore. In other words: It’s almost exactly the kind of adaptation a property like Mortal Kombat deserves.
And right in the middle of all of that is Karl Urban, hamming up a storm as the washed-up 90s action relic Johnny Motherfucking Cage.
The original film took place in 1995, so it made sense for Cage to be a then-current action star eager to be taken seriously. Cage was loosely based on Jean-Claude Van Damme in the first place, at a time when Van Damme and a dozen other action stars like him were starting to feel like yesterday’s news. Thirty years later, Johnny Cage can only exist as a decades-past-his-prime has-been. And I truly mean this as no offense to Karl Urban, but the role fits him like a glove. His blockbuster movie prime is in the rearview mirror, but make no mistake, the guy’s got some great roles under his belt. This is Judge Dredd we’re talking about here. This is Dr. McCoy. This is Eomer of the Rohirrim. This is the goddamn Doomguy. Karl Urban IS Johnny Cage. He’s no stranger to silly sci-fi shit, and you can see the movie itself acknowledging that he’s the best thing in it.
MKII picks up where the last film left off, but as much as this film is Johnny Cage’s comeback story, it’s also the story of Princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who watched her father die at the hands of Emperor Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), losing the tournament and causing her world to come under the Khan’s rule. A generation passes, and now it’s Earth’s turn to make one last stand.
All the heroes from MKI are back: Firebending Bruce Lee stand-in Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), special forces tough girl Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), robot-armed special forces tough guy Jax (Mehcad Brooks), knife-hat warrior Kung Lao (Max Huang), immortal god of thunder Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), and also the previous film’s made-up audience-insert character Cole Young (Lewis Tan), whose special power is literally just a block button.
And then there’s the villains, because like every other MK film, the plot is little more than an excuse to pit a wide variety of characters against one another. So let’s list off all of those now: Evil sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Han) returns. Fan favorite career criminal Kano (Josh Lawson) comes back from the dead thanks to the film’s other evil sorcerer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman). There’s Princess Kitana’s staff-wielding bodyguard Jade (Tati Gabrielle), as well as Kitana’s resurrected zombie mother Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen). And speaking of resurrected, Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) returns as a Netherrealm shadow demon3 who will absolutely have to fight Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), the film’s other resident Netherrealm demon.’
The actual plot goes something like this: Shao Kahn intends to cheat his way into winning the next Mortal Kombat tournament by having his assassins murder Lord Raiden and harness his lightning to power an amulet that will grant Shao Kahn immortality. And it’s up to our heroes to find the amulet and destroy it in order to save Lord Raiden and beat Shao Kahn once and for all. And somehow, Johnny Cage helps them do this. Don’t worry about it4.
Where the first film found audience-insert character Cole Young learning about his magic abilities and noble lineage in the process of preparing or this mystical tournament, the sequel realizes pretty quickly that we don’t need him anymore. We have Johnny Cage for that. This leads to the inevitable battle between Cole and Shao Kahn, where a hopelessly outmatched Cole gets utterly annihilated, at which point the film quietly sweeps him under the rug so that Cage can take over. Problem is, Cage doesn’t have special powers. He’s just Johnny Cage, a point he makes repeatedly as he bumbles his way through the plot until he finally discovers his purpose and entertains an alien warlord named Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) with his fast-talking bullshit and acrobatic fight moves. This becomes the one really poignant moment in the film, where Cage actually manages to impress someone, giving him the courage to do other things, like traveling to hell to seek Scorpion’s help destroying a magic amulet. You know, actor shit.
Mortal Kombat II ping pongs back and forth between ridiculous fight scenes, which might seem like a really boring way to write a movie, but then I don’t know how else you would write a movie about Mortal Kombat. Just like with the games, we came for the fights. Trying to shoehorn these characters into a classically-structured four-quadrant summer blockbuster just isn’t going to work.
[Sidenote: To the Hollywood producers out there: Stop worrying about all the quadrants. Make the right movie, make it well, and your quadrants will find you. If you don’t believe me, then believe the crew of college girls who showed up at my screening in full Mortal Kombat cosplay to hoot and holler during every fight scene. This movie was absolutely for them, and frankly, I’m just glad they had a good time.]
Mortal Kombat II somehow manages to keep all its balls in the air long enough to not feel like a complete waste of time. That’s really the most impressive aspect of this entire thing. Where the original 1995 film got by on straight-faced charm and a commitment to the bit, Mortal Kombat II succeeds largely by accepting that the franchise has moved on to some truly nutty places since then. We’re not at the point where they can start pulling in robot ninjas or celestial elder gods or time travel anything, but this film somehow proves that, despite how trashy and junky this franchise is, there’s still plenty of juice in the tank.
FINAL RATING
3.5 stars (out of five). S’some pretty good shit.
- We reviewed it’s thrash/industrial-heavy soundtrack on my podcast a few years ago.
↩︎ - See also: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 3 Ninjas, Surf Ninjas, Ninja Gaiden, Samurai Pizza Cats, Street Fighter, etc.
↩︎ - In the games, Sub-Zero dies and becomes a demon ninja named Noob Saibot. For all the silly shit going on in this film, the name ‘Noob Saibot’ was apparently a bridge too far, because nobody—and I mean nobody—calls him that.
↩︎ - SPOILER: He kicks the amulet so hard it explodes. ↩︎
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