My nine-year-old enjoyed Mortal Kombat well enough. Yes, this is an R-rated movie, with R-rated language (that he knows never to utter, especially at school) and its share of gore-drenched combat, but the violence is cartoonish, there are few weighty or disturbing “thematic elements” and the tone is appropriately arch. Aside from a grim prologue, this version is no less kid-friendly than its PG-13 predecessors. Despite a bigger budget and a more “real-world” template (aided by some lovely location work in Adelaide and South Australia), this new Mortal Kombat has no delusions of grandeur. It’s cheerfully silly and generally enjoyable as a grindhouse action fantasy, a throwback to a time when A) a movie based on a video game wasn’t par for the course and B) such IP-specific entertainment hadn’t swallowed the industry whole.
We begin with a grim and serious prologue, with the wife and son of Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) being slaughtered by Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) before he himself is struck down. It’s a “this is a real movie, dammit” prologue, akin to Bryan Singer opening X-Men in a concentration camp. The movie peaks at that opening beat, in terms of both filmmaking and realistic violence, as the rest of the film plays (perhaps appropriately) as a live-action cartoon. The screenplay, courtesy of Greg Russo and Dave Callaham, shares quite a bit of DNA with that first X-Men movie, in terms of plot points, narrative structure and self-winking mockery. As weird as it is to have a new character as the lead, it does allow the in-game characters to just be stylized versions of themselves.
We eventually meet a sizable portion of “fan-favorite” Mortal Kombat characters. As they say, trust a few (Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade, Mehcad Brooks’ Jax, Tadanobu Asano’s Raiden, Ludi Lin’s Liu Kang and Max Huang’s Kung Lao). Fear the rest (Joe Taslim’s Sub-Zero, Chin Han’ Shang Tsung, Sisi Stringer’s Mileena, Nathan Jones’s Reiko and Mel Jarnson’s Nitara). The wild card, shockingly, is Josh Lawson’s comically despicable Kano. Introduced as a foil for Sonya, the distinctly Australian jack-ass acts as lynchpin and comic relief before Nelson’s Kabal randomly turns into a snarky joke machine. This is the kind of movie where Goro pops up and nobody poops themselves in terror, and where two mortal enemies monologue at each other in different languages before admitting they have no idea what the other is saying.
As for the action, well, it’s fine. We get that prologue and a quick car chase showdown followed by a relative lull until the expected second-act climax. And, yeah, the third act plays a tricky game by giving us a Mortal Kombat tournament without really giving us a Mortal Kombat tournament. I might argue that this is one of those feature-length prologues, but you get what you came to see in terms of the marquee characters looking like their video game counterparts and bloodily fighting each other amid mystical circumstances. The film slyly resolves its story while teeing up for the next chapter. Presuming the killed-off characters actually stay dead for the sequel, I’d argue Mortal Kombat works just well enough as a singular movie and a sequel set-up picture.
I do very much appreciate that there is little explanation of its fantasy elements. Bi-Han shows up with ice powers “just because,” as do the various superpowered combatants. Even the explanations we do get are mostly for the sake of character-specific pay-offs. Yes, it earns the R-rating, but the gore is neither as punishingly real as a Mel Gibson flick nor as over-the-top grotesque as a Peter Jackson horror movie. Aside from a few “fatalities,” it’s conventional R-rated martial arts action. Oh, and while there are some “from the game” fatalities, the movie absolutely drops the ball by failing to include any explicit friendships or anything resembling a babality. Cowards, damn cowards all of you! Now producer James Wan owes me dolphin fights in Aquaman 2 *and* babalities in Mortal Kombat 2.
Look, by the standards of video game-based movies, this is another good one from Warner Bros., which has been (relatively speaking) knocking these out of the park (Tomb Raider, Rampage, Detective Pikachu and now Mortal Kombat) for the last three years. It’s refreshingly unassuming and pleasingly unpretentious, coming off like a kid-friendly action fantasy that just happens to be cartoonishly gruesome. I mean that as a compliment, since it sometimes feels like “kids movies for adults” have supplanted everything else in the marketplace (and certainly in the discourse). The X-Men “movie as a series pilot” structure works here and using a franchise newbie as our lead allows much of the supporting cast to just do their thing. It’s not quite a flawless victory, but nor is Mortal Kombat a cinematic fatality.
