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Mortal Kombat is one of those classic games that everyone has played at some point.

I tend to take the ‘hit every button’ approach to gameplay until something happens.

Due to its popularity, it’s not surprising that they made a live-action version of it in 1995, and now again, in 2021.

There’s just one problem and it’s a problem that both films seem to have struggled with. Mortal Kombat doesn’t really have a coherent storyline or characters that share traits that would make sense when you throw them together outside of the limits of the in-game fighting ring.

The New York Times picked up on this in a review of the latest film, which they call “a snazzier, marginally more coherent movie”. They also say that “the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience”.

Here’s a synopsis before we watch the trailer.

The 21st-century “Mortal Kombat” begins in 17th-century Japan, where a great warrior, Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), is vanquished and his wife and son killed. Less comes of this than you might expect. Flash forward to the present and Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a cage fighter whose telltale birthmark destines him to compete in a tournament called Mortal Kombat. (“They spelled it wrong,” he observes.) Before representing “Earthrealm” against Outworld, “the most brutal and murderous of all the realms,” he and similarly branded comrades must uncover their inner superpowers.

Right, on to the action:

It looks like the kind of film you watch just for the ‘cheese factor’.

It does get points for creativity, though, with ” the carnage demonstrating some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?).

See what I mean by ‘weird’?

You can catch it on HBO Max.

[source:nytimes]