Mortal Kombat (2021)

Sub-Zero Standard

Video game movies need to get out of the artistic ghetto. Before Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize, comic books were derided as cheap entertainment printed on cheaper paper and aimed at sub-literate children. Before Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight became the first film of its kind to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, comic book movies were considered slightly smarter action films at best, and gaudy power fantasies at worst. Before The Last of Us captured the imaginations of millions of hyper-engaged players worldwide with its intricate story and complex characters, the popular conception of video games was somewhere between Pong’s laconic, 8-bit table tennis match and Mario smashing a coin block. Video game movies have yet to arrive at their moment of legitimacy.

You may wonder why video game movies require legitimacy. They don’t, I suppose. But the genre’s failure to strive for true cinematic excellence has left me struggling to not write it off altogether. I fully admit this boils down to a subjective definition of the word “awesome”.

As a teenager, I hung out at bowling alleys with friends. We never actually bowled, preferring to hang at the miniature arcades that were inevitably tucked in a corner beside the lanes (this was ten years after stand-alone arcades were a thing). I was a Galaga kid (which was also about as old and uncool as stand-alone arcades), but I enjoyed watching people much more adept at button-mashing than I take on 64-bit foes in games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. The fights, the fatalities, the friendships—they were awesome.

They also lasted about five minutes per round, as I recall (the friendships held out a little longer, in most cases). It was around this time that video game movies began popping up. Super Mario Bros. Street FIghter. Double Dragon. Mortal Kombat. The ones I bothered to watch were the exact opposite of awesome; partly because they were drenched in mid-90s cheese; partly because it’s harder to sustain the kinetic, pulse-pounding energy of a five-minute sparring match over the course of ninety—especially when the whole enterprise is driven by aesthetics instead of story.

This disparity between short-burst “awesome” and sustained “awesome” stuck with me, and likely had an outsized impact on how I look at movies today. Too many people forget that film is a medium of sight, sound, and time. In this context, time is best represented by narrative—be it propelled by dialogue, performance, or even grand aesthetics that invite the viewer to feel and/or imagine along with the movie (the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example).

I’ve sat through the director’s cut of The Wild Bunch without checking a clock. I wouldn’t want to spend two hours and twenty minutes watching someone else play Street Fighter. Conversely, anyone who would dare distill Sam Peckinpah’s meditation on the changing of the Old West into its most sensational, bloody components would be abusing the medium for which it was created.

The trailer for Simon McQuoid’s remake of Mortal Kombat excited me. It was about two minutes long and featured impressive special effects, what looked to be some imaginative fight choreography, and just enough of a hint that the shiny, new “R” rating might also carry with it some narrative sophistication instead of just smushed brains and dangling spines. We’re in the John Wick era, after all, in which a franchise no doubt influenced by evolving fighting-game sensibilities has proven that one doesn’t need to sacrifice heart, humor, or grand mythologies in service of mere violence.

Sadly, McQuoid and company love reminding us that their movie is not of this era. From the “I guess racism is cool again” antics of Aussie eye-beam-guy Kano (Josh Lawson)'; to dialogue whose pinnacle is two instances of “Let’s finish this”; to a plot so predictable the film itself rushes through significant developments at 1.5x speed, Mortal Kombat 2021, like last month’s Godzilla vs. Kong, wears its low self-esteem on its sleeve—so assured that diehard fans will see nuance and surprise as impediments to the action, rather than the building blocks of something they might actually be proud to recommend outside their developmentally arrested peer groups.

Yeah, that’s harsh. What of it? I respect myself as a moviegoer. More importantly, I respect my time. I don’t like having to calibrate my expectations based on the genre of the film I’m getting ready to watch—but that point is quickly approaching.

Film snobs are the worst. An ex-brother-in-law once told me he’d never seen Alien because he “doesn’t like sci-fi”. Sounds dumb, right? Sounds like someone whose notions of the genre’s potential are still rooted in paper-plate spaceships and household lizards terrorizing army-men toys on model-railroad sets, right?

Laugh all you want: video game movies are actually stuck in that holding pattern of wasted potential right now. As a film critic, it would be difficult for me to dismiss a film, sight-unseen, just because it happens to be based on a video game. Were I to do so, I would rightfully be called an elitist. But the longer I indulge these overlong, under-thought CGI spectacles, the more foolish I feel.

Is it too much to ask that Mortal Kombat’s down-on-his-luck-MMA-fighter protagonist, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), be more than a wide-eyed “Chosen One” archetype? What if he’d been written as richly as Tom Hardy’s Tommy Conlon in Warrior? Imagine that guy being thrust into a world whose fate hinges not only on his ability to fight but on his ability to believe in himself and pull together the crumbling remnants of his family? As it stands, Cole’s wife and daughter exist to be endangered and rescued, exhibiting all the motivation and agency of extras in an Olive Garden commercial.

There’s no point in going further into the movie. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the poster, the trailer, and the fact that it’s based on a video game. The good guys triumph over the bad guys who, regardless of how authentic they are to their side-scroller counterparts, have all the visual panache of rejected villain concepts from Cannon Films’ Masters of the Universe movie.

This is far from a balanced review, so I’ll leave you with three mildly positive notes:

First, the end credits animation, in which character portraits appear in morphing pools of 2-D blood, is spectacular.

Second, I got a real kick out of the climactic fatalities. Specifically, there was so much thought put into choreographing the final moments between Hat Man and Dragon Girl (you can look up their names) that I momentarily believed in better things for the genre.

Third, the cast is mostly top-notch, aside from the forgettable Tan. I’ll be on the lookout for future films starring Jessica McNamee, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Max Huang, and Tadanobu Asano—unless they’re sequels to Mortal Kombat.

In summary, I gave Martin Scorsese a lot of shit when he accused comic book movies of not being “cinema”, insisting that they’re little more than expensive and forgettable roller coaster rides. Turns out he was in the right neighborhood—just on the wrong block.

For a different perspective on the film, watch my Mortal Kombat discussion with Keeping it Reel’s David Fowlie.