Earth is in trouble - if a group of human warriors cannot win an intergalactic fighting tournament, then the planet will be conquered by the evil Shao Kahn and his human emissary Shan Tsung (Artt Butler).
Can Liu Kang (Jordan Rodrigues), Sonya Blade (Jennifer Carpenter), Jax (Ike Amadi), Johnny Cage (Joel McHale) and Scorpion (Patrick Seitz) defeat this menace?
After watching Mortal Kombat 2021, I was keen to check out some of the earlier movies. I was not able to find the 1995 movie, but I did find this animated flick from last year.
It feels weird to say this, but after all the criticisms I had about MK 2021, this movie avoids all of them. This movie is leagues better than the latest movie. If they do make a MK 2, they should bring in the creative team behind this project to make it.
In fact, watching this movie, I was struck by how similar it was in concept - it opens and closes on Scorpion's story, and the main action is based around a human character who has no idea what is going on.
What is startling is how poorly the 2021 film handles this latter element, with Cole (Lewis Tan). Cole is not a character from the game, but that is irrelevant - the problem is that he has no personality. This is not Tan's fault - the script does not give him a character to play that will also be relatable to the audience.
His role as the audience surrogate is here taken by Johnny Cage, a Hollywood action star played with airhead confidence by Community's Joel McHale.Watching Cage bounce around this world really brought home how much the live-action film is missing personality. Kano has been held up as the film's saving grace, but he is ultimately a villain. Cage is a superficial guy who is forced to put himself in danger for the greater good - the movie does not really lean into giving him an arc, but he does change over the course of the movie. Cage does act as more of a second lead in this movie, and his overall dynamic with the other characters is comparable to Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China. While Cage's character is not the most original, he is a functional entry point for non-gamers like myself. I spent the movie wondering why Cage was not in the live-action movie, and why Lewis Tan was not cast as that character.
Another strength of this movie is how unpretentious it is. This movie is 80 minutes long, and moves. Aside from Scorpion, we get the bare minimum of backstory from our characters - Sonya gets a flashback - and the other characters we gauge via dialogue and action. This movie feels like all the fat has been cut out, in the style of an old-fashioned genre movie: cut the filler, get to the money shots.
The other thing the movie does is set down clear rules for the world. My big problem with the live-action movie was that I could not follow the powers of Lord Raiden, Scorpion and Sub-Zero. That made it hard to understand the stakes of what was going on. This movie lays out the exposition of who people are and what Mortal Kombat is efficiently in the first 20 minutes. A lot of it is through dialogue, but any potential portentousness is offset by Johnny Cage's irreverence.
The movie is not long, which was a nice change of pace. In some respects it does feel more like a pilot for a TV show than a movie, but overall it briskly gets through its premise with some good fight sequences and interesting characters. The 2021 movie could not even get to a proper tournament. So many movies are obsessed with laying out the tracks for future instalments, and Mortal Kombat 2021 is a prime example of that.
If I have one criticism of this movie, it is that it takes its best tricks - like the ridiculous violence - and does them over and over again. While I enjoyed the movie, the blood-letting does get more repetitive as the film goes on.
It also does not include the Immortals song, but I did not notice it was missing till the movie was over, so that's good.
Scorpion's Revenge is not a secret masterpiece - it is just a solid movie that works on its on. Hopefully the movers and shakers behind the live-action movie can take a few notes.
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