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Old 6th October 2021, 05:27 AM
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MacBlayne MacBlayne is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Japan
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Mortal Kombat


Mortal Kombat is a delightful martial arts feature. Packed with colourful visuals, fun characters played by a likable cast, a pulse-pounding soundtrack, and lots of energetic fight scenes, Paul W.S. Anderson's Mortal Kombat is an enjoyable way to while away 90 minutes.

Simon McQuoid's Mortal Kombat? Hoo... boy!

Mortal Kombat is one of the stronger franchises out there. At least it's the strongest fighting game franchise. Street Fighter, The King of Fighters, and Tekken may be better technically, but they don't translate well to other mediums. Street Fighter's drug lord villain story is fine before it turns into a techno-god story. The King of Fighters's plot about hosting an inexplicably popular secret tournament to harness the power of a Japanese demon lord falls on its arse when nobody is kicking each other. And Tekken... I have no idea what Tekken is about.

Point is, Mortal Kombat is perfect for other mediums. The lore of Mortal Kombat is filled with religious clashes, ancient wars, romance, lust, backstabbing, and treachery. It's like somebody crammed a bunch of Shakespeare into Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and The Bride with White Hair.

While it didn't fully ignore its background, Anderson's film put preference on having funny characters doing kick-ass fights. It was a perfectly valid way of the starting the series, but there was always room for a film to delve into series' mythology. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation borrowed freely from it, but shit the bed when it tried to make it all accessible.

So we now we have the more recent attempt. A lot of hype was riding on this since the video games had a massive resurgence in popularity. Fans were hoping that this film would do the series justice.

It seemed like it would. McQuoid's Mortal Kombat looks dark, grim, sombre. Very sombre. In fact, boring, lifeless, or dull would be better terms. For as dark as the games are, they possess a strong sense of humour. Anderson's film strongly influenced the later games. Those games possessed more colours, leaning more heavily into Hong Kong cinema. The Asian thunder god Raiden from the games was given a more ambiguous ethnicity to match Christophe Lambert. The noble and stoic Liu Kang was now brash and impulsive. The spunky Sonya Blade became belligerent. Johnny Cage went from the greatest actor to a trashy, cocky egotist. And, thanks to Trevor Goddard's legendary performance, Kano was rewritten from Japanese to a vulgar Australian.

Kano is about the only thing McQuoid's film gets about right. Josh Lawson is possessed by the spirit of Goddard, chewing the scenery and spitting it out as snappy one-liners. The rest of the cast is perfunctory, but in fairness, the script never calls on them to do anything other than grimace. Chin Ha's Shang Tsung seems bored to be there (a far cry from Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa's sneering), and while Tadanobu Asano may be the better actor overall, nobody could ever accuse Christophe Lambert of sleepwalking. Joe Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada are actually great as notorious rivals Sub-Zero and Scorpion, but they barely show up in it. When they do appear, it feels crowbarred in to satisfy fan expectations.

Speaking of fans, for a film that aspires to be super-serious, it's a wonder why they jettisoned a lot of the lore in favour of its own magic bollocks. Rather than a bunch of skilled fighters picked by Raiden and Shang Tsung, this has a magic tattoo that transfers upon death and grants superpowers. And rather than follow the games, the plot has the borderline victorious Shang Tsung plan to assassinate the kombatants before the tournament. That's right! Mortal Kombat doesn't have Mortal Kombat in it.

Still, who cares, as long as the fights are great? Right? ...Right?

Sadly, Mortal Kombat has fallen victim to Marvel syndrome. Barring an atmospheric opening and a belting final fight (rumoured to have been shot by Taslim and his team instead), the action scenes are CGI spectacles in brown-grey locations, swooping cameras, and frenetic CGI-enhanced editing enhanced by a mediocre soundtrack. It is suitably gory, and not hard to follow, but it lacks the rush from seeing forearms blocking punches, or knees meeting teeth.

Mortal Kombat is dreadful. It had the potential to kickstart the martial arts equivalent of Game of Thrones, but resorts to uninspired Marvel Universe nonsense. Like Marvel, it builds and builds and builds to reveal that it might pay off in the next film. Well, fück that!

On a further note, this came out in Japan around my birthday, and was my friends and I's first cinema trip in almost a year. I spent the rest of the evening apologising profusely it.

As Shao Kahn would put it, "That was pathetic!"
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