Mortal Kombat (2021): A Generic, Hollow Copy-and-Paste

The infamous Mortal Kombat series is no stranger to moral panic. In 1997, Andrea Wilson dragged her thirteen-year-old son, Yancy, and Midway Games into court after Yancy killed his brother with a kitchen knife and a move that the grief-stricken mother claimed was inspired by Cyrax, a character in the game. The court ended up ruling against Andrea, but this was only the crescendo of a wave of outrage over the series's spectacularly over-the-top violence, a wave that has plagued it throughout its otherwise immaculate climb to the top of the gaming hierarchy. Long story short, people made a big deal over the franchise. The irony that its 2021 film adaptation lands with such a hollow thump is sickening.

Maybe it's unfair of me to criticize a movie for not trying something new, but I also ask myself this: how many times are we going to have to watch a washed-up, lovably rough-around-the-edges protagonist get a second chance? Perhaps that's a cynical thing to think, but watch hundreds of movies a year, and you'll stop blaming me. Mortal Kombat is a mediocre-to-bad movie trying to use its brand recognition to sell tickets and avoid the hard work of being imaginative or competent. Its comeback-film trappings are uninspired, and its execution is mediocre at best. This is a movie you've seen a hundred times over, just with a different logo slapped on the package in a shallow attempt to make it look more interesting.

Obviously, Mortal Kombat is a fighting movie, and on some fleeting level, it's a good one. The combat (kombat?) scenes and setpieces are its main draw, and they're good enough to pass for just about any movie out there. However, for a movie built around these fighting scenes, I wish that they were exceptional. They are the type of spectacle familiar to modern-day Hollywood, high-octane affairs of the fists between people who are just a little bit more than human, accompanied by an epic but generic musical score that emphasizes every blow, every cut of a blade. Outside of that, the movie is a series of cameos (kameos?) and references that are putting in the bare minimum to connect these fight scenes in a sense of continuity, call-backs designed to make long-time fans of the franchise go, oh look! It's...!

If you've played the games or even watched someone else play them, you know that Mortal Kombat is relatively pure fantasy outside of a few references to the real world. This movie tips its hat to the fact that Earth is a major part of the lore, and I respect it for trying to be more than the bare, fantastical minimum it absolutely needed to be. However, it's also trying to be a character drama, and it doesn't work because it devotes a lot of screen time to the characters without actually investing in their deeper personalities. That's a shame, because these characters are supposed to be the connective tissue for a whole movie that falls apart without it. Bizarrely enough, Mortal Kombat adapts the cool but surface-level elements of its popular characters without bothering to give them something as simple and familiar as a mere personality.

However, there is one bright exception to this rule, and that's Kano, an ornery and foul-mouthed Irish redhead whose crass, fitting sense of humor is refreshing. Mortal Kombat is the most fun whenever he's on screen. So it's a shame that even Kano falls prey to the contrivances of a cast that refuses to be identified by anything other than good or evil. I've nothing against a simply-drawn character, but the ones in this movie are often nothing more than frustratingly dull. Mortal Kombat is trying so hard to be taken seriously, and so when it takes its foot off the gas just a little, you'll really wish it had slowed down more to appreciate the fact that movies are supposed to be fun.

On a craft level, the movie's cinematography is quite respectable when it captures real-world environments, a well-lit, diverse spectacle of seedy boxing arenas and rows upon rows of lockers that make you wish the movie had just been set on Earth. The visual scheme dissolves when forced to become a fantasy that's woefully overreliant on computer graphics. Mortal Kombat is ultimately a fantasy, but it doesn't always have the budget to back its ambitions, which results in an undersaturated, generic sea of rocky landscapes trying to check off all the cliches of other genre movies like it. In large part, Hollywood seems to have moved past the curse of the video game adaptation, and the recent trailer for Zach Cregger's Resident Evil actually made me interested in seeing that movie, which is amazing given how awful its previous adaptation was. On the other hand, Mortal Kombat drags us back to an older era of underwhelming video game adaptations, where brand recognition did its best to make up for a filmmaker's lack of ambition or ideas.

Have you ever watched a movie and felt as though you've seen it before? That happens whenever it's more interested in copying its influences or source material than in using imagination to twist them into something new. I'll grant that this movie is an adaptation, but the tropes it borrows from countless other movies like it are obvious, a raging river of reminders that other movies have already done everything we're seeing here, and done it better. This one is an occasionally pretty birthday box that ends up being empty on the inside.

Mortal Kombat (2021) - 4/10

Proverbs 26:11