Directed by Simon McQuoid
Written by Greg Russo, Dave Callaham
Starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson
Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and some crude references
In theaters and streaming on HBO Max April 23

by Alex Rudolph. Staff Writer

Twenty minutes into Simon McQuoid's new Mortal Kombat reboot, ice ninja Subzero rips special forces commando Jax's arms off. This isn't really a spoiler–Major Jackson "Jax" Briggs has had metal prosthetic arms in the Mortal Kombat video games since 1995, and the second he shows up here, the Time To Metal Arms countdown begins. The games have introduced sixty-something playable characters over the last 29 years, and each is defined by a couple special moves, a few catchphrases and a costume. Some of the characters have razor hats, some have prehensile hair, some have knife fans. The new Mortal Kombat does a great job incorporating as much of that as possible, even if sometimes it feels like you're waiting around to hear somebody to inevitably yell "Get over here" or bust out a laser eye. It isn't as explicit as Captain Marvel's running gag about how and when Nick Fury is inevitably going to lose his eye, but every part of Mortal Kombat has its own Time To Metal Arms countdown, even if it's something as small as a person saying the words "flawless victory." Mortal Kombat is also, thank god, a great action movie.

A necessary side-note about the source material: The Mortal Kombat series' in-game lore is as complicated and knotted up as any fantasy epic's, and it's almost all happenstance and it's almost entirely developed from utility, in-jokes and business decisions. There are so many ninjas in the mythology, for example, because the amount of physical memory on an arcade board was tiny when the first game was being developed, and Mortal Kombat's creators knew they could get away with designing one ninja, covering his face and then painting him different colors. There are characters named after the game's designers, characters based on stray technical language in a game's back-end. One of the series' main characters was killed off for a time because the motion capture actor who played him had shot a promotional ad for a competing game. This is a nearly 30-year-old series of video games, comics and movies that takes its story very seriously and makes that story up like Madam Ruby in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, frantically inventing psychic predictions based on things around her room. The people in charge of keeping Mortal Kombat's timeline straight are both the children making up stories while playing with action figures and the parents watching on, patiently going "Oh, so Superman is mad at Spider-Man because Spider-Man beat him in a race around the Lego island? Very cool, sweetie."

As a series developed by a handful of Chicago kids in their twenties, the story a filmmaker would have to draw on is a big sloppy mix of things that were interesting to young people in the early 90s. "Mortal Kombat" is a fighting tournament modeled after the one in Enter The Dragon, starring a bunch of magical ninjas and versions of Bruce Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme with the serial numbers filed off. Robots, post-apocalyptic road warriors and kung-fu princesses were all added in due time. It's nonsense, specifically crafted to get one kid to say "you've got to see this" to another. The story is less important than all the blood and the way players beat it out of each other.

Interestingly, the Mortal Kombat video games have been getting more cinematic in the past decade. The last few entries have all included modes where you watch a long movie and then pick up the controller when it's time for two characters to fight. A new Mortal Kombat film has been in development hell since Mortal Kombat: Annihilation bombed in 1997 and it's a strange coincidence this Mortal Kombat finally got made in the era of video game streaming, when the source games are doing their best to be their own film adaptations. This isn't like Paul W.S. Anderson's Mortal Kombat, which I love, but which also came out when video game stories were told in still frames with text and instruction manual copy. Today, you get a new Mortal Kombat movie every four or five years, it's just packaged with a Mortal Kombat game.

That's why it's so great that the new Mortal Kombat commits. It's gruesome and flashy and every hit makes an impact. You can almost always tell where the actors are in relation to each other, which was a given in the kung-fu movies that inspired the original games but a rarity in big budget action post-Michael Bay. I especially loved the way superpowers were depicted in the film. Everybody gets one (in a bit taken from X-Men, if you're already a special person, your ability will reveal itself in a moment of crisis) but the powers are never the center of the fights. Powers augment the action by making characters fast or able to throw fireballs. They gild all the wrestling moves rather than overpower them, meaning you're never stuck watching two people clench their teeth as they shoot energy beams at each other from across the room. One fight directly mirrors the trailer showdown in Kill Bill, which seems as much an inspiration on the feel of the movie as wuxia and VOD action. If this thing was all CGI, it would be redundant, but McQuoid and his actors really sell the physicality of a generic underground boxer getting his ass kicked by a four-armed monster.

That underground boxer is one of the few aspects of Mortal Kombat totally original to the film. Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is our audience surrogate in the same way Johnny Cage was in the original film. He's a fighter who discovers that his birthmark ties him to the inter-dimensional Mortal Kombat tournament and that he needs to work with thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and fellow chosen ones Kung Lao (Max Huang), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks) and Kano (Josh Lawson) to stop Shang Tsung (Chin Han) and his crew from taking over earth. There are a dozen main characters and they all get their fight showcases, power reveals and catchphrases. They're all bound to signature moment countdowns.

Most of the characters' personalities blend together, which makes the decision to create Cole so confusing. Why make the one movie-specific flourish another non-entity? The only character that really distinguishes himself is Kano, looking like Robin Williams got really into the homesteading aspect of Burning Man. He's been imported from a Marvel movie, constantly quipping and giving "So that happened" takes on everything he sees. Five minutes in, you wish he was as blank as the people he's poking at. Still, his Time To Metal Arms countdown is a laser eye. You don't want him to fully disappear.

Mortal Kombat's biggest countdown is in the title, and it never pays off. "Movie about mystical fighting tournament lasts two hours without ever reaching said tournament" is truly next-level franchise place-setting. You get halfway through Mortal Kombat, realize you aren't going to see the thing all the characters are talking about and get a little indignant. Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter if this movie succeeds and we get a sequel in three years. The promise of the tournament is the promise of a bunch of fights, and Mortal Kombat already delivers those. Again, the story means nothing compared to the moments. If I wanted a fulfilling story, I wouldn't be watching a movie that plays a dubstep remix of its theme music (complete with 1992 video game voice samples) over the end credits. The punching is the point and the punching happens, even if it isn't in the environment the movie keeps telling you it'll happen in. By making the entire movie set-up for a potential sequel, Mortal Kombat pushes you away from actually caring about any story that would show up in Mortal Kombat 2. The story devalues itself in favor of big moments. The important thing is that you see a Carl Weathers-circa-Predator analog getting his arms ripped off.