By George & Josh Bate
While Mortal Kombat (2021) honored the iconic game series with signature fight moves and memorable dialogue, the video game adaptation committed a fatal(ity) flaw in omitting the actual Mortal Kombat tournament from the film. Mortal Kombat II ameliorates this core issue, yet miraculously ends up inferior to its predecessor in nearly every regard, offering audiences the cinematic equivalent of playing a Mortal Kombat game until your mind goes numb and eyes start shutting.
Mortal Kombat II finds the villainous Shao Kahn(Martyn Ford) years after taking over the kingdom of Edenia and claiming Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) as his daughter. In an effort to conquer Earthrealm, Shao Kahn initiates the tenth Mortal Kombat tournament and engages Earthrealm’s champions, led by Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), in a fight to the death. Raiden recruits washed-up movie star Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) to join the ranks of Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole Young (Lewis Tan), and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) in an attempt to emerge victorious in the tournament and prevent Earthrealm from falling under Shao Kahn’s villainous rule.
Mortal Kombat has endured as a game franchise as long as it has due to the undeniable fun that comes from selecting your fighter, clashing with a rival, and delivering all kinds of brutal blows and game-ending fatalities. But the appeal of the 12 games and various spin-offs is that you are the one masterminding the fight, choosing what moves to use, and ultimately the one who can take pride in victory or sorrow in loss. By nature of its medium as a film, Mortal Kombat II loses the immersive quality of the games and, instead, is tasked with gaining and retaining our interest through style, narrative, dialogue, and filmmaking. Remarkably, the sequel falls short across the board.
Screenwriter Jeremy Slater (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, FANT4STIC) immediately takes the primary criticism of the preceding film to heart by centering Mortal Kombat II entirely around Shao Kahn’s tournament. After a prologue that establishes Kitana as one of the main protagonists, the film falls into a repetitive and grating structure for the duration of its runtime. Director Simon McQuoid’s sequel proceeds through action sequence after action sequence, with almost no reprieve or story development in between. This may have been tolerable had the movie ran at a lean 90 minutes, but, at nearly two hours, the film proves as punishing as a nut punch from Johnny Cage.
Surprisingly, Mortal Kombat II underwhelms with its overwhelming number of action sequences. With the exception of an intentionally over-the-top fight sequence taken from one of Johnny Cage’s early movies, the action is shockingly bland and over-choreographed. Sure, there are a few cool beats embedded into the action, but these are few and far between. The majority of the action lacks the grace of an iconic martial arts film, the brutality and elegance of a John Wick movie, and the stomach-churning violence of a Mortal Kombat game.
In the absence of compelling action, Mortal Kombat II relies more heavily on its story and characters to captivate and entertain. The former falls short, however, as the barebones narrative that drives the games forward fails to effectively translate to the big screen. The rules of Shao Kahn’s tournament are underexplained and come across as unintentionally silly, while the stakes of Shao Kahn emerging victorious in the tournament are never truly felt.
Johnny Cage and Kitana are the closest Mortal Kombat II gets to having actual characters (if they can be called that). A miscast Karl Urban adds much needed personality to the mix and emerges as a unique audience perspective in the initial stages of the film. However, Cage’s arc from reluctant hero and washed-up movie star to world-saving champion is painfully easy to forecast and even more painfully underdeveloped. Where Cage ultimately ends up in comes across as unearned the film woefully underdeveloped and, to make matters worse, Urban is afforded agonizingly unamusing one-liners to crack.
Adeline Rudolph’s Kitana, meanwhile, has the most substantive character arc in the film, and yet even she makes for a hollow protagonist. Rudolph’s stiff performance aside, Kitana floats in and out of the film with little calculation, in turn making it difficult to invest in her journey.
Kitana and Cage are accompanied by a large host of supporting players, all of whom leave little of an impression. After playing prominent roles in the last film, Scorpion and Sub-Zero are awkwardly shoe-horned in in the final act. The same can be said for Kano, the sole character responsible for some half-decent laughs, namely due to Josh Lawson’s comedic timing and delivery. At least, Mortal Kombat II lives up to its title by delivering plenty of brutal deaths, many of which occur to notable characters one would not expect to succumb to their demise. Unfortunately, the ending note of the film undermines the weight of all the losses the film accrues.
Unlike the 2021 film, which struck a fine balance between giving fans fun details to feast on and remaining approachable to newcomers, Mortal Kombat II panders far too heavily to franchise die-hards. Convoluted worldbuilding and underdeveloped characters leave one feeling as if they have missed core exposition, or even missed an entire installment of the franchise. Slater’s screenplay takes such an inside-baseball approach to the sequel that the film is rendered disappointingly unapproachable, even to those who have been casual fans of the franchise over the decades.
In a completely authentic way, the highlight of Mortal Kombat II, at least for us, comes in the form of the end credits – in part, because the grueling two-hour slugfest without a semblance of a reprieve has finally come to an end, but, primarily, because The Immortals’ iconic Mortal Kombat theme song is blasted in all of its glory, against a well-designed end credits. It’s a testament to how grievously the sequel disappoints that an end credits sequence that plays the game’s theme song taps into the sheer enjoyment of playing a Mortal Kombat game more than the preceding two hour film.
VERDICT: 4/10
Mortal Kombat II is the cinematic equivalent of playing a Mortal Kombat game until your mind goes numb and eyes start shutting. While the sequel delivers on the tournament the first film sorely missed, director Simon McQuoid’s movie miraculously ends up inferior to its predecessor in every regard. With no reprieve from two hours of bland action choreography and a paper thin story populated by even thinner characters, the film alienates even casual fans of the franchise by pandering too heavily to die-hards and featuring far too convoluted and underdeveloped worldbuilding. While miscast as Johnny Cage, Karl Urban adds much-needed personality to the mix and there are a few delightfully gruesome fatalities to feast on, but little else redeems this woeful sequel. It says something when the end credits of a video game adaptation evoke the feeling of playing the games more palpably than the preceding two hour movie.