The Violent Delights of Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat is a hell of a movie. I came in at a strange point. I know what the games are, if only from memes sprinkled around the internet but haven’t played them. When I saw the trailers, I expected something like a fantasy-flavored John Wick. Tight action, a bit of character and worldbuilding. Ultimately, it would be easy to write off Mortal Kombat as a bad movie and I’ve seen plenty of reviews do that. But to do so discredits the movie.
What makes a good movie? You could point to things like interesting, dynamic characters. A cohesive plot with twists and turns, and so many other things. One could also say that Mortal Kombat lacks those traits, and I’d have to agree but that misses the point entirely. Mortal Kombat was never meant to have those traits as its strengths.
The de facto protagonist of our ensemble is Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a boxer and descendant of a mighty ninja who we saw murdered in the film’s cold open. Cole is a family man and an audience surrogate who asks questions to get exposition flowing.
Other characters fall into similar roles of a character type and a narrative role. Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) is the badass woman and incredibly knowledgeable about the inter-dimensional tournament Mortal Kombat. The character feel flat, almost like…a character in a video game? Who’d’ve thought it. Each character has just enough backstory to go in a little informational snippet beneath their fighting stats.
The plot has a similar scantness, alternating between bloody battles and expository scenes that justify the next fight. They feel like cut scenes, dropping enough information to tide us over between objectives and give a taste of character.
Once you get to the fight scenes, the movie takes a note from its video game origins. The fights are bloody displays of combat prowess, spiced up by exciting powers like fireballs and teleportation. These fight scenes are the meat of the movie, the reason you came to see a fighting game adaptation, and the spectacle lives up to expectations.
And , that’s the truth of the matter. Nobody went to see Mortal Kombat for deep introspection or to ponder the inner mechanisms of the universe.
They came for fatality.
I’ve seen several critical reviews of Mortal Kombat that decry the movie, but miss the point of the film. Mortal Kombat’s strengths are not in character or plot but an enviably sense of self-assurance. It knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and it does this masterfully.
There are so many small moments in the film that scream “I’m an Easter Egg.” Some of them I understood. Sub-Zero’s fight with Liu Kang, for example, took place in a narrow corridor and I could feel how it looked like a two-dimensional fighter.
There were other small flourishes, shots that focused on character reveals and the like, that I knew must hint at similar moments from the games. Honestly, it made me wish I played. I know the impact these moments can have in the enjoyment of a film.
Moreover, the thin characters and interludes between fights, as previously stated, feels like watching a video game in rapid progression. I found many of these moments funny, a perfect breather between battles.
At the end of the day, Mortal Kombat is a movie for a very particular audience. One who wants to watch the carnage of superhuman individuals whaling on each other for the fate of the world, one who wants to see figures from the games come to life. Mortal Kombat isn’t a piece of Oscar bait. Rather, it’s a film that firmly embraces what it wants to be: A bloody spectacle of intense action and just fun so that viewers can forget their troubles a while and enjoy the show. And it does so
