This…..
This Mortal Kombat movie….
So, how did it come to pass that I watched this shit. Well, I really wasn’t going to. But it must be one of these things where everyone is so horny for movies to come back, save for one or two people, everyone I knew watched it. And yeah, the reviews were lackluster. Even the reviews from like actual fans of the franchise were mediocre.
But, still randoms would ping shit about how awesome the movie was….I don’t know. The right combination of boredom and fatigue on a weekend morning lead me to watching it.
Holy shit do I regret that shit. This movie is bad. And its not bad in like a Dragonball Evolution way. Its bad in that bad blockbuster way.
First things first, the script is piss awful. We just had Godzilla v. Kong with their shit script, and this one is right up there with the same shit. Trying to make you really care about characters that suck. I am not sure there is a goddamn thing they could have written to make me give a shit about their main character, Cole Young, but they certainly wrote a ton of words on a page about it. You follow him through his “Maybe he’s right!” journey where he’s love for his family finally gets him super sayian powers and blah blah blah.
No one cares. It’s really tough to stick any type of landing when your main character is fucking boring.
It doesn’t help that all the actors (save one, more on that later) are fucking GARBAGE. Holy shit I was BEGGGING for ’92 Shang Tsung the whole fucking movie. The director must have been operating on the one take principles cause we got some realllly bad line reads. Like asylum bad. It gets to a point where you just want the fighting to start just so you can walk away from the bad acting.
And that doesn’t help. The fight choreography should actually be a highlight of this film, but the editor went to the Michael Bay school of editing where each hit, punch whatever is a cut. So you get nothing. I got lost through half the fucking fights…..also to be clear, not all the fights are winners. The fight with Goro is a chunky stupid mess.
Ok, so lets talk the thing I really fucking hate. The score. Holy shit the score….the dude is going for waterdowned Mick Gordon and hits the mark hard. Mick really needs to go to his house and beat the shit out of him. Until you get to the very end where the music goes totally videogame-y, everything else is trying to do the big percussion and riffs of the Doom soundtrack, through a 90s guitar lens. It really pissed me off, cause if you want Mick, go pay for Mick. Cheap bastards.
So what did I like. Well, I liked two things. Josh Lawson’s Kano completely carries this movie on its back. The only character that acts like this is a video game movie and not like the fucking world is hanging in the balance. Everytime he does anything its a joy. I honestly wish nothing but the best for him.
The other thing I would like to shout out is the CG. It avoids being terrible. Thats a fucking achievement. When you can actually see whats going on, their creations actually looks good. So bully for you.
But the rest of the movie just fucking disappoints. Just over and over. At one point, I thought they were going to have some balls. Kung Lao dies (after 2-3 other villians that I don’t give a shit about). And I was like, alright, they are going to kill off main characters….but then Goro dies in the aforementioned stupid fight…..no fuckin way they kill him in the first movie. Don’t worry, Shang Tsung pulls some No One’s Ever Really Gone, and poof, with literal smoke, they gunna be fine.
You know what this franchise’s problem is. It will never beat the ACTUAL good Mortal Kombat movie. The one they based the game off of.
Boon and Tobias saw Bloodsport and was like, lets make a game of that. And thats the whole problem. No matter what they do, they are not going to beat fucking Bloodsport at its own game. That movie is a goddamn masterpiece in making shlock. With characters you give a shit about, superior cinematography, and…FUN. This movie is fucking Fun.
You know whats not fun. Mortal Kombat (2021). It’s just not good.
1/4 – And it only gets an extra 0.5 for Kano. Just fucking go watch Bloodsport. Its so much better.