Mortal Kombat II: A Bland Repetition of Better Movies

Mortal Kombat II plays like what a little boy sees when he bangs his action figures together. Little boys are impressionable, and this movie is too, devotedly repeating every possible action and fantasy movie cliché while barreling through a lineup of fight scenes held together by one-liners and vaguely philosophical ramblings. Simon McQuoid’s first adaptation of the infamous video game franchise struggled to find an identity to call its own, and though an impressive leading performance from Karl Urban as the cocky Johnny Cage gives it some life, this sequel mostly follows suit. It is a series of all-too-familiar, visually chaotic fight sequences strung together by something barely resembling a story, a generic rehash of better movies that wants you to think it can stand on its own two feet. Those hollow legs can’t hold it up.

Once again, the Mortal Kombat gang is getting together for a tournament where Earth’s very existence is threatened if our heroes can’t get their crap together and win. Well boo-hoo. I’ve seen the fate of the world, heck, the fate of the very universe threatened by countless villains in just as many movies, and something so cosmically vague as the world is at stake just isn’t scary anymore. Mortal Kombat II features a lot of very cool-looking characters, and what would have made me care is if each of them had feelings and hopes that could die with them. It doesn’t invest much time in making you care whether they lived or died, and I wish that a movie about a tournament where they will be doing one of those two things had sat down to consider its own moral and even spiritual weight.

There’s little more to Mortal Kombat II than campy fan service, and it doesn’t really try to hide it, meandering through the various realms of its universe to find new characters from the games so that long-time fans of the franchise can say they saw them on the big screen. It’s a loose series of fight scenes strung together by one-liners, empty objects shining with empty allure, and vague words of wisdom from Asian people. It’s like a constant sugar rush that still wants to be taken seriously, with each competing element trying to distract us from the weaknesses of the other. It’s not hard to see through the ruse. This is fanbase catering with zero thought put into it.

Now, even if the screenplay is lacking, there are some good things to say about its transference to the screen. The character of Johnny Cage is treated with an immense level of respect, and he’s even given an intro evocative of a 1990s action movie, a rivetingly macho sequence that feels out of place in its own movie simply because it has a personality. Cage is a campy protagonist who admittedly doesn’t have much depth, but his charisma makes up for it more than it doesn't. He’s in over his head after being selected for mortal kombat, something of a faker by the nature of his being a movie actor; yeah, none of the fighting for which he’s been selected is actually real. However, by some mixture of luck, charm, hard work, and a miracle or two, he gradually gets better and better at fighting as the movie drags on, maybe good enough.

Mortal Kombat II is not deep, but its hero is well-acted and likable. I wish that he were afforded more screen time, but the time he gets is effective in a way the rest of the movie isn’t. The seriousness of the movie is overdone, and this is why Cage’s levity works so well – it doesn’t feed it. One throughline that also helps this movie through its ups and downs – mostly downs – is the “first to five kills wins” scoring system. You see, the fighters participating in the tournament have been split into two teams, and if the villainous team defeats five heroes before the heroes can defeat five of their fighters, then Earthrealm will be theirs. This gives it a level of propulsion the previous movie didn’t have, and even if it falls prey to many blockbuster stereotypes, it at least feels as though it’s moving somewhere, like it cares about how it ends.

As you see, it does some things better than the one before it, but the bottom line is that this sequel is mostly more of the same. It’s a sea of artificial-looking landscapes held together by combat scenes adhering to every known Hollywood trope; one needn’t look further than the very beginning of the movie, where the demonic-looking Shao Kahn kills the outmatched King Jerrod in single combat that looks like it was copied and pasted from a dozen other films. This movie so desperately wants, needs you to feel something, but it doesn’t put any thought into making that happen, instead aiming for vague emotional beats that quickly get overwhelmed by the thoughtless action scenes, anyway. It is a recycling of tropes we’ve seen done better countless times before, a movie more content to relive memories than try to make them. You’re better off watching Fight Club or the many great Asian fantasy films out there, not some lukewarm mixture of the two that can’t make up its mind on what exactly it wants to be. It’s nostalgic in a way that may remind some of how they played with their toys as a kid, but it's also nothing more than a homage to a million other movies and memories that did it better.

Mortal Kombat II wants to be taken seriously, but it doesn’t want to put in the work to make that happen. It is indistinguishable in a crowd of other summer blockbusters like it, and will attract a lot of casual theatergoers, rake in a reasonable amount of cash, and then slip into obscurity as an afterthought in the service of a game franchise that did it better. Longtime fans of Mortal Kombat will likely walk away pleased that their characters were brought to life on the big screen, but compared to HBO’s The Last of Us or Amazon’s Fallout, this movie is more reminiscent of an era where it was assumed video game adaptations would be bad before they were even released. It has almost zero thought put into it, so I walked away with just as many about it. An ironic new chapter in the legacy of a formerly hyper-controversial franchise, no?

Mortal Kombat II - 5/10

Proverbs 20:4