BLOOD WORK: SILVER TONGUED SILVER SCREEN: MORTAL KOMBAT (2021)

MORTAL KOMBAT

"Test your might"

The next big Warner Bros. movie has hit theaters and HBO Max.

Mortal Kombat!!!!

We here at Blood Work love video games. We especially adore fighting games. Hollywood's track record with adapting video games into films is... not very good. You can count the good video game adaptations on one hand: Sonic, Detective Pikachu, Rampage, and Netflix's Castlevania series. And let's not forget the first Silent Hill movie. The number of mediocre to failed video game based films, on the other hand, is countless. 1995's Mortal Kombat isn't the worst video game movie by far, but it also hasn't held up as well as we'd like. And Mortal Kombat: Annihilation from 1997 less so.

So where does this new reboot fall on the spectrum? First we should be clear: the Mortal Kombat franchise is awesome and full of great and amazing characters. Personally though we've always been more partial to the likes of Capcom and SNK properties. Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, Darkstalkers, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur, these are our fighting games we love. It should be noted that among the fighting games we love, their film adaptations (aside from some anime features) have been atrocious. In this we concede Mortal Kombat's superiority, MK has the better films by far. All this is to say that while we appreciate Mortal Kombat we are not very attached to the property.

Back to the 2021 movie, we liked it!

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS

We greatly appreciated how hard this movie leaned into the R rating. F-bombs and gore galore! The only thing the movie was missing was some quality nudity and it would've fully embraced the R rating. Mortal Kombat differentiated itself from the fighting game pack by leaning hard into the blood and gore, the infamous FATALITIES garnering much attention. In this respect, MK21 delivers on a franchise staple.

Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero and Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion were by far the standout actors and characters of the film. We will watch anything with Joe Taslim in it and he doesn't disappoint here. Likewise Hiroyuki Sanada, during the opening sequence, kicks so much ass and is criminally underused through the rest of the film. The climax of the film being these two facing off once more is perfect. It's a shame they didn't have a mid movie rematch before then.

Kano was hilarious and a show stealer. Sonya was awesome. And Jax was great although underused as well. I thought Kung Lao was pretty cool too while Liu Kang felt a bit underwhelming. Raiden too seemed a little underused too.

Beyond this, the character selection seems a bit strange for the movie. There's a mix of popular and relatively obscure characters on display in the film, with many favorites missing. But then there are some pretty big deaths here, which has us thinking that the character select here was more deliberate, to kill off some characters in brutal fashion without burning through the core cast of MK heroes and villains. And then when you factor in a trilogy mindset in the construction of this film (putting the cart before the horse, maybe?) more film choices here make sense.

There were some things that bothered me though. The lack of showing the actual tournament for example was disappointing, but this factor's into the trilogy mindset though. Lewis Tan's character, Cole, also didn't have a fair shake. They built him up to be the great hope of Earth's heroes and didn't give him the epic fight scenes he deserved.

What really hurt this movie was that we watched it on HBO Max instead of the theater. The last movie we watched was Godzilla Vs Kong and we watched that twice in a theater. It was amazing (even if certain aspects of the movie weren't). Seeing a theatrical movie at home just doesn't have the same effect (this coming from us who love our home video collection). That's us saying that a streaming premiere just doesn't do a film like this justice. We do hope the theater industry survives and bounces back.

THE VERDICT

Mortal Kombat was bloody good fun but falls just shy of greatness. The trilogy mindset, while architecturally sound, doesn't benefit the experience here. Instead it just leaves a lot of potential languishing on the table. If the filmmakers get the chance to do a sequel and, the arcade gods will it so, that the trilogy can be fully realized, this first film will be better for it. As it stands, it feels a little like the first Captain America in that it was satisfactory but its longevity relies heavily upon what comes next.

All this is to say, this movie feels like the first act of a story rather than a whole story of its own. It's just a stepping stone to get to the big payoff, which may or may not come depending on how well the box office return is. And given we're still living in a pandemic ridden world, the box office chances are still slim (although hope remains, Godzilla Vs Kong showing that a big box office haul is still possible).

Overall Ranking: 6 out of 10