Video game adaptation comes out fighting
Actor Josh Lawson delivers the best lines like he was getting bored leaning on the bar on a stinking hot day in Queensland and just wanted to see if he could start something.
Review
Mortal Kombat (R16, 110 mins) Directed by Simon McQuiod. Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2
It seems to me that a decent movie adaptation of a video game franchise is a harder beastie to get right than most of us hand-wringing liberal elites who pollute the scribbling classes ever give it credit for.
If you stick too closely to the game play you’ll finish up with a tensionless assemblage of poorly linked scenes that feels more like peering over someone’s shoulder than actually watching a movie.
But if you try too hard to make a ‘‘good movie’’ out of an idea that only really makes sense within the demented logic of a video game, then you’ll find yourself trying to flog a tedious mess of expositional dialogue and not nearly enough fighty stuff, all in the name of insisting on having ‘‘a story’’.
The lousiest example in the past few years would be Assassin’s Creed, which asked Monica Bellucci to exhort various minions to ‘‘insert him in the animus’’ so many times, I pretty much fell off my seat laughing up in the back row.
But, at their best, video gamebased movies are a hoot, with action to spare, a nicely irreverent way with the obligatory characters and enough charm and wit on screen to power us through whatever story-telling is necessary between the action scenes.
Mortal Kombat can trace its whakapapa back through two earlier films, the 1992 arcade game and more than 20 home console iterations, none of which I’ve ever played from beginning to end.
But even a numpty like me who gave up gaming when Aro St Fish and Chip Shop sold its last Galaga knows that Mortal Kombat isa legend of ground-breaking video design – and is notorious for
containing levels of violence that make the opening 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan look like a Wiggles concert.
All of which makes me happy to report, after a surprisingly packed session on a typically warm and sunny Wellington afternoon, that Mortal Kombat arrives with an R16 sticker firmly attached to the poster and just about enough good ideas to lift it somewhere near the top rung of video game movies I’ve sat through in what I laughingly refer to as my adult life.
The film-makers – first time feature director Simon McQuiod is an avid gamer – get enough of the game-play on screen to please the fanatics, but also establish something that could almost pass for a backstory if you woke up in a charitable frame of mind.
On screen, getting that balance right means that for every wellconstructed fight scene – and there are dozens of them – there are enough laughs to keep the film percolating until it’s time for the next arterial spray.
Actor Josh Lawson is the secret weapon here, with a very ’Stralian take on the villainous Kano, delivering all the best lines like he was getting bored leaning on the bar on a stinking hot day in Queensland and just wanted to see if he could start something.
Mortal Kombat won’t be troubling anyone’s list of 2021’s Best Films. But it does what the trailer promises and sets up a sequel that I won’t mind seeing at all when it duly arrives in a year or two.