Mortal Kombat II

4 outta 5

Mortal Kombat II is a movie that acknowledges its video game roots. When the game first came out in the 90s it set off a moral panic, sold a bunch of copies, dumped a lot of quarters into arcades, spawned a bunch of spin-offs, adaptations, sequels with an ever deepening lore. This is a sequel to 2021’s Mortal Kombat and the fourth live-action film and it has lots of Kombat things. The end result is a film that gleefully, and somewhat brutally, dispenses with elements that didn’t work, adds more characters, and delivers even more one-on-one brawl scenes. This is messy and dumb and melodramatic and bombastic and looks really crazy and is exactly what a Mortal Kombat movie should be.

The worlds of Earthrealm and Outworld have been engaged in a tournament of Mortal Kombat for centuries, and Outworld has won 9 of 10 tournaments with the fate of the world hanging in balance. The Outworld deadly champion is Shao Khan (Martyn Ford), a guy so mean he killed a king and then took the land, his wife and his daughter, Kitana (Adeline Rudolph). Now Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and his fighters for Earthrealm enlist former karate champion and current washed-up actor, Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) as a member. Along with fighters Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Sonya (Jessica McNamee) and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Johnny fights against Khan’s champions of evil like Bi-Han (Joe Taslim), the resurrected and now bad Kung Lao (Max Huang) and the resurrected and still a jerk Kano (Josh Lawson). But as the Earthrealm fighters keep failing, it looks like Earth may be doomed.

Urban as Cage is really great, playing an actor so washed up that at conventions his table is abandoned while crowds gather at the tables for YouTube streamers and influencers. He delivers a great, bitter rant about how his style of cinematic karate went out in the 90s. At first, Johnny is out of his depth, and loses his first fight. There’s a great moment when Johnny has been defeated by Kitana and he just stands there, sways back and forth, then falls over, which is what happens in the game when the player wins a fight and doesn’t input a fatality. Urban has a bunch of awesome reactions to all the insanity, like when he thinks Raiden’s magic is “some %$#@ed up coma dream”. Kitana is the other lead, the big final fight is her vs. Shao Khan, and she has some surprisingly stirring moments like when she declares her allegiance to Earthrealm to defy her evil “father”. Lawson’s Kano returns basically to provide a bunch of really funny one-liners as he’s resurrected and just annoyed with all the mystic mumbo jumbo. He is such a blast that he shifts from pure bad guy to chaotic neutral. There are so many supporting characters that some get shafted; most disappointingly Raiden spends most of the movie in a coma. The designs are so excessive it’s easy to tell the good from the bad.

Bi-Han, aka Sub-Zero is resurrected as Noob Saibot, which gves him a different look, but honestly, Sub-Zero is more iconic. He now has the ability to make duplicates of himself but his level on the villainy scale has gone way down. Kano mentions to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) that Bi-Han has been resurrected which makes Scorpion go from a contemplative existence in the afterlife to full Scorpion mode. He gets so mad even magical afterlife peaches rot to dust. There is a brawl involving multiple characters vs Saibot that is nicely chaotic but frankly the finale battle of the last film with Scorpion and Cole vs Sub-Zero was way better.

Speaking of Cole (Lewis Tan), he was an original character created for the previous film and basically the lead. In this one he is in Raiden’s crew, gives a speech about how he had to say goodbye to his wife and child in case he dies, then he gets killed by Shao Khan. Really brutally too, like his head is smashed in by a giant mallet and his headless corpse is dumped into a river of goo. Cole was kind of a befuddling choice for a protagonist in the first film as he was dull, had no distinctive power or look in a series full of distinctive characters, so the way he’s so offhandedly dispatched here is almost an apology for making audiences endure the character. Actually a lot of characters die in this film, which is true to Mortal Kombat. So many perish that the film ends with the characters vowing to go into the afterlife and retrieve them. Death is so easily overturned in this series it’s basically a time-out inconvenience.

Mortal Kombat II delivers game-accurate carnage and fatalities. It gets absurd at times, like when two characters are having a heartfelt emotional moment between brothers but that is undercut by the fact that the one guy has been cut in half by a buzzsaw hat. There are some great fights, like when Johnny Cage is running for his life from the multi-toothed monster Baraka and earns its admiration. This film sometimes forgets who is the main character, and often relies on fight scene wows and gore than actual plot development, but it is definitely an authentic, and very messy, Kombat experience.