Joel on Film

The first Mortal Kombat movie—the one that came out in 2021, not to be confused with the 1995 film of the same name—understood something vital about the concept of bringing the popular video game series to life, which was that any given filmmaker looking to do so would be wise to focus on the goofy, bloody fun of the endeavor. The sequel is certainly every bit as goofy and only a few degrees less bloody, which means the time passes amicably enough, but despite the addition of an intriguing new protagonist, it’s not nearly as much fun. It’s a little difficult, though, to quantify the reasons that this is the case.

After all, Mortal Kombat II does give us a slightly bigger scope by revolving around the actual tournament of the title, which requires tributes from Earth and another, concurrent realm to fight to the death for the supremacy of one of those realms. This might have technically been lacking from the previous movie, which featured a few bloody fights but was more about the build-up. Now that we actually have the fights, though, the entire enterprise not only mirrors the nature of a game in the series but also adopts the routine sense of repetition.

That’s a shame, too, because the new hero really is a character with a lot of potential, even though that potential has gone disappointingly untapped by Jeremy Slater’s screenplay. He’s Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a fading action star from the 1990s in the tradition of a Seagal or a Norris, who is literally summoned from a fan convention by elder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and the pulse-blasting former soldier Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) to fight on behalf of the Earthrealm. Cage’s movies are the stuff of B-movie legend, at least for some, but an amusing scene, involving challenged combat in exchange for a favor from an intimidating race of indentured servants with rows of scary teeth, confirms for us and, more importantly, himself that his onscreen fighting skills contain more than meets the eye.

Urban’s having a lot of fun here delivering jokes and insults, a lot of them amusingly driven by studio-specific pop-culture references, but everyone else seems to be locked into the tired recitation of lore and mythology and the rules of the tournament. In addition to Raiden and Sonya, we get former fighter Joe Cole (Lewis Tan) and the robotically-armed Jax (Mehcad Brooks) back, and a few new characters arrive, too. Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) is the daughter of the defeated king of Outworld, which was overtaken by the glowing-eyed, horned-helmeted Shao Khan (Martyn Ford), and Jade (Tati Gabrielle) is Kitana’s best friend, philosophically captured by the tyrant’s ideas.

None of them matter, obviously, as much as the crushing weight of plot, which is really just connective tissue and a platform for the many, many fights to be had. They’re enjoyable enough on a conceptual level, and the fatalities are occasionally clever, although the returns of more than one presumed-dead character sort of sours the experience by undoing the minimal stakes of the previous movie. That said, the way the movie presents the final Big Fight, between the only two characters who could possibly be fighting, is appreciated.

Still, it’s all a lot of business for the sake of business, guided by a literal scoreboard floating in the sky above both realms and eventually the source of a dual climax split between some bloody fights and the other heroes scrambling to find a doodad that does a whatchamacallit. Mortal Kombat II could easily have been as bad as the last time this very same studio attempted a cinematic sequel to this material, but it does fall sadly short of the silly fun its predecessor provided—which means it still fails to learn a particular lesson.

Rating: ** (out of ****)