AD1MZ didn’t even want to write about this when he finished it, so I’ll talk about it instead—though not for long, as there’s not much to dig into here.
As for anything good, I’d say there are occasional flashes of solid fight choreography for the half of the cast that can actually fight. Unfortunately, the other half—those with speaking roles—mostly come off as Disney Channel rejects. And even when the action is decent, it’s smothered by terrible editing. The wide shots are so far out that they make the characters look like ants in a landscape shot, making their inclusion jarring whether during a fight or a dialogue scene.
Deliberate campy stupidity can be enjoyable, but it quickly becomes exhausting when there’s nothing to ground the audience. Watching these characters repeatedly let their target run off just so they can fight someone else feels like taking a tour through an Alzheimer’s clinic with orientalist interior design that exclusively treats MMA fighters.
Part of the reason this isn’t fun to watch (unless you’re already a fan—and even then, there’s plenty here to piss fans off) is that it knows it’s dumb and campy, lifting from a whole library of kung-fu B-movie junk, yet it never elevates that material into something greater. The games’ convoluted timeline may have required a bachelor’s degree in horology to fully understand, but at least the story served as connective tissue between the spectacle fights. If you didn’t care about the lore, you could ignore it and still have fun with the inherent “gaminess” of it all. But when this movie thrusts its nonsensical plot to center stage under the guise of a franchise starter, it’s like watching a comedian laugh at his own jokes before he’s even finished telling them. And they’re all jokes I’ve heard before from better comedians.
It’s charmless, trash-culture recycling itself over and over. Watching this made me understand how people who don’t care about Tarantino’s inspirations might view his movies—like being force-fed a bunch of things he loves while he directly lifts from his favorites, never converting the uninitiated. And while I don’t personally feel that way about Tarantino, this movie made that perspective easier to grasp. I hope it’s happy for that revelation.
The biggest frustration is how much of this movie isn’t actually about this movie. It’s just setup for the next one. Normally, this is where I’d say it feels like an extended trailer for a real cut that’s yet to come, but MK2021 barely even bothers with that. Instead, it wastes time rattling off about “prophecies” and “realms,” dumping unnecessary exposition that doesn’t impact the immediate story in any meaningful way. Sure, we get to see Goro—but he comes and goes so quickly, without any introduction to who or what he is. And since practically every character in this franchise, male, female, or otherwise, has the same chiseled, muscular build, you’d think a four-armed brick shithouse would stand out as someone worthy of a bit more backstory. Instead, he’s just another generic henchman.
If you came into this without prior knowledge of Mortal Kombat, you’d leave knowing just as little as when you started.
And here’s the rub with the fanboy defense of, “Of course it’s supposed to be bad! That’s what makes it fun!”—if this didn’t have the attachment to an already beloved fighting game franchise with trademark gory finishing moves, what would be left? If not for that M-for-Mature appeal tickling the nostalgia trigger, would there really be a committed fanbase pretending this cartoonish stupidity is “cool” or “fun”? It was never about the story. It was always just a series of tangents we tolerated because we already had the violence and knew there was more coming.
Speaking of which, the gore in this is surprisingly sparse. The fatalities? Barely there. And they cut the tournament, making me wonder why this wasn’t just called Barney’s Magic Treehouse for all it mattered. The Kung Lao fatality and Jax’s kill were fine, I suppose. The fight between Sub-Zero and Scorpion was decent, considering everything we had to wade through beforehand. But I genuinely thought the main guy in the bronze suit was going to die, go to the Netherrealm, and become the new Scorpion—or his spirit’s next iteration—because at least that would’ve been more interesting than only seeing Scorpion in the intro and then having him fuck off until the last 20 minutes.
And look, I know it’s a reductive comparison, but credit where it’s due to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat (1995). Say what you want about that movie—like how most of its goodwill rides on nostalgia rather than objective quality—but at least a non-fan could watch it and still understand what the three main characters wanted and why they were at the tournament. This movie procrastinates from its own titular tournament with useless origin filler, then looks at the clock and says, “Whoops! Guess you’ll have to tune in next time when Shang Tsung… uh… really means it!?”
There are rumors of executive meddling, and while I’m on the fence about placing blame, I’m also not invested enough in this series to care. I can see the push to Marvel-ize the franchise—pretending to take the canon seriously while telling it poorly—but I doubt that a lack of meddling would’ve fixed the janky editing, generic set design, unrelatable performances, or the general lack of direction. I was dreading Johnny Cage’s introduction, but this movie was so boring that I actually missed that walking meme of a man, just to add some zest to the dreary affair.
If you enjoyed this, either as a fan or a newcomer, that’s cool. I’d like to find a version of this that I could have fun with someday. Hell, if this had just been Enter the Dragon with well-edited one-on-one fights—doesn’t even need to be groundbreaking, just stop cutting on every hit—with enough gore to make Takashi Miike wonder if he’s getting old, and the classic characters delivering their pun-filled fatality announcements instead of some random background announcer doing it, then I could’ve had fun with it.
But as it stands?
★½ out of 5.
HBO Max continues to suck the fun out of their releases.