Debuting as a video game in the early ’90s, Mortal Kombat became both popular and notorious for its violent and gory death scenes. This renown led to feature films in 1995 and 1997; onward to TV shows, both animated and live-action; comic books and other incarnations; to a 2021 movie reboot; and now to a sequel, Mortal Kombat II.
Not being a video game guy, I was unfamiliar with the franchise when I saw the reboot. Having no real knowledge of, and certainly no nostalgia for, the series, about all I felt going in was an annoyance that something from as recently as the ’90s was even eligible to be an object of nostalgia.
It’s a sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic featuring strapping, good-looking warrior types of diverse races and genders, doing battle across a variety of dimensions. Each combatant is a master of martial arts or swordplay, and each also has his or her own magical superpower. One can fling fire from his hands, another can shoot deadly rays from his eye. Another has robot arms, and yet another has a saucer-shaped metal hat with a cutting edge that he can throw like Oddjob’s bowler in Goldfinger.
Most are back for Mortal Kombat II, scripted by Jeremy Slater. Directed, like the first film, by the Australian Simon McQuoid, the new film focuses on Edenia, which sounds like a medication for a skin condition with a long list of possible side effects, but in this movie is a goodly realm taken over by a tyrannical warlord in a horned skull mask. This guy has “adopted” a princess (Adeline Rudolph) years earlier after killing her noble father. The warriors compete in a tournament in hopes of overthrowing horned skull guy and making Edenia nice again.
That’s as much effort as I feel like putting into a synopsis. As with the 2021 film, this silliness is moderately entertaining, as long as it keeps moving. Most of the fights are staged with imagination and swashbuckling flair, and the attractive actors spit their angry, often obscenity-laced lines at each other in amusingly flat, prosaic accents.
The wild card in the cast, this time, is Karl Urban as Johnny Cage, apparently a very popular character from the game who wasn’t represented in the 2021 film. Cage is an earthly martial artist from the 1990s who became a cheesy movie star and is a washed-up autograph show veteran when he’s whisked away to fight for the future of the “Earthrealm.” Squinting with understandable disbelief at everything he sees, Urban takes top honors for vitriolic delivery.
And again, as with the first film – indeed, as with the original game – this movie is loaded with extreme, bloody splatter. It all appears to be CGI, however, so it has little visceral impact; the combat doesn’t seem too convincingly mortal.
