The casual observer will be forgiven for thinking that the II in this film’s title suggests that this is the second movie to be made from the video game-inspired franchise. But no.
The first was back in 1995, just three years after the first arcade game was first released amid a flurry of complaints about the violent graphics in which blood spurts from beaten opponents and lands with a squelch in lurid red globules around their mutilated bodies.
The first live-action movie version saw the literally and metaphorically 2D characters travel to, as the pleasingly shonky trailer puts it, “the mystical realm of Outworld to defend Earth from Shang Tsung in an ancient tournament”.
It goes without saying that over three decades later things have moved on somewhat. The latest iteration is both the fourth Mortal Kombat movie and the second after the 2021 reboot directed by Simon McQuoid, hence the double-digit Roman numerals.
This one boasts The Boys star Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. And this time the new plot sees Urban’s Cage and his superpowered co-fighters, Sonya, Jax and Kano, travel to the mystical realm of Outworld to defend Earth from its ruler Shao Kahn in an ancient tournament. Ring a bell?
When we first encounter him, Cage is reduced to offering paid autographs at Comic Con conventions and being completely ignored. This threatens to bring a pleasing strain of real-world irony to the plot.
The New Zealand actor thankfully ditches his laboured East Ender accent used in The Boys, but keeps his actually quite engaging brand of nihilistic attitude for the role of Cage. The use of his middle finger to push his shades in place is the running joke that tells you all you need to know about his views on life. But thereafter what you get is exactly what it says on the tin. Fight, after fight, after fight, after….
The good guys’ objective boils down to saving the world by destroying an amulet. Just as Alfred Hitchcock summed up his hatred of period drama by saying that he didn’t want to make films in which people write with feathers, so a similar sentiment about the action fantasy genre can cite the amulet, the go-to ancient artefact on which the future of humanity inevitably depends.
This second or fourth iteration is strictly for Mortal Kombat nostalgia addicts. The message for everyone else is, just don’t.
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