‘Mortal Kombat II’ Shouldn’t Be This Rizzless (original) (raw)

It’s a movie based on a game famous for its gruesomeness. Surely it deserves to be a little fun?Photo: Warner Bros.

I am a longtime admirer of Karl Urban, my Kiwi king, an actor who never pitches himself above his material and who is willing to endure some terrible hairstyles for the sake of his art. In The Chronicles of Riddick, he sported what I can only describe as a space mullet; in Ghost Ship, he had bedraggled grunge locks; and in Thor: Ragnarok, he had no hair at all, just a pair of striped tattoos on his bare scalp. In Mortal Kombat II, in which he plays faded movie star Johnny Cage, he gets off comparatively easy with a blond bouffant with an inch of dark growth at the roots. It’s the cut and color of someone still trying to evoke his decades-ago heyday, even if he no longer has the money or motivation to maintain either the way that he should. But while Urban hurls himself into the role of Johnny with the commitment of someone for whom the phrase “sequel to a reboot of a fighting-game adaptation” signals only the latest opportunity to shine, the film, which was written by Jeremy Slater and directed by a returning Simon McQuoid, offers so little to work off of that even he gives off the faintest whiff of exasperation.

Johnny is the putative protagonist of Mortal Kombat II, a follow-up to 2021’s Mortal Kombat, which was centered on MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan). Cole was created for the movie, and his abrupt fate in the sequel provides some subtle clues that he was not well received. But even anchored to a character from that very first 1992 game, Mortal Kombat II is deeply uncertain about what it’s trying to do. It seems to want to distance itself from the campy adaptations that were released in the ’90s, but its most lively moment is a re-creation of one of Johnny’s hits from that era, a movie called Uncaged Fury in which the star does windmill arms and a Van Damme–esque split leap over a bazooka that’s captured from multiple angles. Now reduced to signing autographs at conventions to get by, Johnny mutters at a bar about how no one wants his shtick anymore — they “want gritty,” “want grounded.” For McQuoid, that appears to mean making a film devoid of color, shooting the incoherent fight sequences against murky backdrops, and treating the origin story of secondary protagonist Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) with the solemnity of a biblical reading.

The result is depressingly rizzless for something based on a game famous for its gruesomeness. (The movie approaches each gory finishing-move re-creation with the perfunctory quality of a porn money shot.) It doesn’t help that the returning good guys — soldiers Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks), warrior monk Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), and the aforementioned Cole — are all a little bland. Alongside the resistant Johnny, and under the guidance of thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), they’re the fighters on behalf of the Earthrealm, chosen to battle five champions from the Outworld to defend our realm, etc., etc. They face down Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), resurrected former Earth warrior Kung Lao (Max Huang), double-dealing Kitana, her bodyguard Jade (Tati Gabrielle), and evil emperor Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) himself. Inevitably, team evil has cooler powers, like Sindel’s scream and Kung Lao’s hat of doom, but in addition to allotting an inordinate amount of its combat time to Shao Kahn, who’s just a hulking guy with a hammer, the movie’s big visual idea is characters blasting one another with beams.

I barely remember anything from the 2021 Mortal Kombat aside from the scene in which Liu Kang, in true gameplay form, repeatedly leg-sweeps an opponent. (The closest the new one gets to this joke is a scene in which a character sways on their feet and then falls over when their foe fails to finish them.) But it was at least movie-shaped. That’s more than can be said for the sequel, which is just driven by pandering, up to and including bringing back characters who’ve died, usually with the help of necromancer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman). Mortal Kombat II is just McQuoid turning a big dial that says “fan service” while looking back at test audiences for their reaction: You want Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) back? What if he’s Noob Saibot now? You want Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada)? He’ll say the line! Aside from the occasional signs of energy from Urban, the movie only really sparks to life when laser-eyed Australian mercenary Kano (Josh Lawson) is brought back for reasons even the other characters in the movie acknowledge are unwarranted. But Kano, spouting endless commentary on how shit Johnny’s movies are, how much eye makeup Quan Chi wears, and how we need to save the world on behalf of unlimited breadsticks and threesomes, provides not just much-needed comic relief but a reminder that there’s nothing worse than taking your source material more seriously than it takes itself.

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