To call this monstrosity ‘repellent’ is too kind
Mortal Kombat 15 cert, 110 min Dir Simon Mcquoid
Starring Lewis Tan, Jessica Mcnamee, Josh Lawson, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ludi Lin, Max Huang, Mehcad Brooks, Tadanobu Asano, Chin Lan
‘In Mortal Kombat,” warns Kung Lao (Max Huang), a warrior monk with an Oddjob-ish razor-rimmed hat, “talent will only get you so far.” That’s certainly one way of putting it. If the next Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron is among the largely unknown cast of this video-game adaptation, you’ll struggle to pick them out.
The first of the Mortal Kombat beat-’em-up games arrived in amusement arcades in 1992 and was celebrated for its charming “fatality” feature, which let players murder their onscreen rivals in ornately gruesome ways. The series always leaned into its B-movie roots, but it was all so grottily derivative that, when converted back into cinema, it just seemed laughable: see 1995’s Mortal Kombat and its 1997 sequel for further details (or, better still, don’t).
The latest version is just as bad, and a lot more expensive. It centres on a new hero, Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, a mixed-martial-arts fighter who’s one of Earth’s chosen warriors in an impending battle with the denizens of Outworld, “the most brutal and murderous of all the realms”. His teammates include two former specialforces types, Sonya Blade (Jessica
Mcnamee) and Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), plus a foul-mouthed Australian mercenary called Kano (Josh Lawson), who’s here largely to puncture the script’s pomposity with toe-curling blokey asides.
The band descends on a desert temple, where they train with Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), a Bruce Lee type who can summon fireballs with his fists. Eventually the bad guys arrive and they fight them instead. Occasionally, a familiar face from Asian cinema – Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano – will drop by in the guise of an immortal ninja, growl something subtitled and lob a lightning bolt into the fray.
Devotees may be enraptured, but this methodical plod through the games’ characters is the opposite of lively storytelling. Worse still, since most battles end with the obligatory fatality, we’re asked to cheer on heroes who disembowel their foes with zeal, before shooting a wisecrack at the gory remains. Even so, to call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The kombat itself is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape, while the graphic bloodshed is rendered in bland, businesslike CG that has you yearning for the honest gloopby-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.
The 1990s are long gone and the Eastern kung-fu classics that inspired Mortal Kombat are freely available on Amazon Prime and Netflix. Why waste time and money on a $55 million copy of a copy when the glorious originals are right there?