A Non-review by Professor Popinjay
Test your might as we fight our way through:
- Mortal Kombat (1995)
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)
- Mortal Kombat (2021)
- Mortal Kombat II (2026)
Pearl Clutchers the world over were appalled at the violence depicted in the Mortal Kombat arcade 1v1 fighting game when it first showed up in 1992. Capcom’s Street Fighter 2 had come out just a year before and it was tame compared to this. Looking back at this original title, the graphics are almost laughable now. A bunch of red digital farts on the screen is abhorrently violent? Okayyyyyyyyyy. Anyway, you had to be an expert to pull off anything super violent.
Aaaaaaand It seemed like expert-level players were produced at the same time as the games. There was nary a machine I could find without some Mortal Kombat aficionado standing next to it waiting to take my quarters and virtually hand my ass to me.
By the time the movie came out, the MK 3 game was hitting the arcades. The roster of playable characters was overwhelming by that point and every single character had a complicated back story. There was not enough time to read about them on the game (for us slow readers) and the internet was still in its infancy. A film presenting some of these stories in a well thought-out and comprehensive manner would be most welcome. We all know how THAT goes though.
Having never become a master at the game but still finding the premise and lore interesting, I was excited to see a film on the matter as were most people my age or slightly older. Reports were prevalent of audiences cheering in theaters simply for the TEASER trailer which consisted of nothing more than fire bursts around the well-known dragon logo and a techno song with a guy screaming the words “MORTAL KOMBAT” so enthusiastically I’m certain his eyes crossed and his tongue stuck out. It was all pretty exciting.
As far as video game movies went at the time, we had Super Mario Bros. (1993) which was fun but hardly an accurate representation of the game, Double Dragon (1994) starring Iron Chef America’s Mark Dacascos, and then Street Fighter in 1994 with Jean-Claude Van Dam and a final film performance from the beloved Raul Julia. I would say video game movies had had a poor track record thus far, but for Raul Julia’s involvement. He always put in 110 percent. I can’t say it made Street Fighter watchable but seeing it to remember Raul is okay. He did it for his kids after all, God bless him.
making fun of a handicapped man. Diabolical!
But a Mortal Kombat movie!?! This wasn’t for babies! This was for ultra-mature super-sophisticated 13 year olds who weren’t phased by extreme violencethefilmwasratedPG-13.
How DARE they (gnomes)? How DARE they make this film accessible specifically to my demographic at the time. It’s as if they wanted the film to take in cash profits from more than just the small group of adults who would be interested in a hyper-violent version of this movie based on a game directed toward teenagers.
Such has been the case with many films directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Fans want violence. He gives them cut-away shots and insinuation. I’m not advocating violence. But when fans expect one thing and the director gives them something else, that seems like bad business. On the flip side, I was allowed to see this movie in the theater so I guess that’s bitter sweet?
Regardless of the mild nature in which the Mortal Kombat (1995) movie was presented, most people came out pretty satisfied. It had pretty much all the characters they could hope for in a single first film and despite not going too deep into any character’s backstory (probably a good thing) each was fairly accurately represented. The only major departure was Lord Raiden.
Raiden was my favorite character, most likely because he was practically ripped right out of the movie Big Trouble in Little China (1986), one of my favorite films. He was supposed to be like a Chinese thunder god (as determined by my 13 year old brain) but he was played by Christopher Lambert whose star power was still burning fairly brightly due to the popularity of the Highlander franchise.
For me, this Gandalf-the-White-lookin’ scratchy-voiced guy was not my Raiden. Raiden was cool. He was a badass. Raiden was a friend of mine and Lambert, sir, was no Raiden. Oh, well. The film had fighting and techno music. How could I complain?
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was iconic as Shang Tsung. This is the film that led me to avidly follow his very successful film career. From License to Kill (1989) to The Man in the High Castle (2015), Tagawa has been a most fascinating actor to witness. He would even go on to voice AND model for Shang Tsung in the game Mortal Kombat 11. Sadly, we would lose Mr. Tagawa in 2025 but I extend to him a very sincere “Flawless Victory!”
Oh, and the film also didn’t disappoint when it came to the character Goro. Goro is a massive four-armed Shokan; a half-human, half-dragon and second from the top in the first set of contenders in this tournament to determine the fate of Earth realm. Manifested in the film through practical effects, Goro is a marvel of puppetry and animatronics. He looks really good for the time.
Costing 20 million dollars to make, the Mortal Kombat movie (1995) was wildly successful, bringing in 122 million dollars in ticket sales making it the most profitable movie based on a videogame at the time. It’s obvious they knew what they had too, because the sequel was blatantly set up in the last minutes of the film.
I watched the sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) yesterday. I tried. I tried so many times to watch this film but it was just. SO. BAD.
I finally decided, the only way I was going to watch this movie all the way through was to start from the last thing I remembered before falling asleep and watching it until I fell asleep again. It took three sessions. It never got any better.
Naturally, I must address the elephant in the room. It comes up in every review I’ve seen or read: Musetta Vander’s atrocious delivery of the line “…too bad YOU… will DIE.”
She shouldn’t take all the blame though. It’s a clunky line, poorly written. It happens in the first few minutes of the film and really sets the bar for what to expect from the whole movie. What’s crazy to me is they spent ten million more moneys than the last film, couldn’t sign on most of the previous actors, and had the shittiest cgi effects I’ve ever seen in a movie that cost this much.
Where did the budget go? Motaro’s ass? The centaur’s back end and lizard-like tale was the only cgi that looked half way decent.
People were primed to see this and ticket sales were soaring once again but word traveled fast as to how much this film stank and the hype quickly petered out. Even still, it was commercially successful and there were talks of another sequel. Thankfully, they must have realized the only reason this made ANY money is because of the hype from the first film and they wisely executed the fatality for this franchise. The third installment churned in development hell for months before they finally concluded these turds would produce no more profit.
There came a short-lived tv series “Mortal Kombat: Conquest” which ran from 1998-1999. Haven’t seen it. There was “Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm”, a 1995-96 animated series. Haven’t seen it. 2011-2013 gave us “Mortal Kombat Legacy” another live action series I know zippy zap about other than MARK DACASCOS plays Kung Lao!!!!! Whoooo! Go Iron Chef America!!!! Sorry. I’m starting to love this guy.
(right picture from Double Dragon movie poster)
Then there’s a bunch of shorts, comics, spoofs, and fan films I can never differentiate from legitimate canon. With so many iterations of media, consistency between them has been virtually nil, with even Midway Games and subsequent owners of the IP rebooting timelines and retconning the backstories of the multitude of characters.
These companies have been cranking out MK games almost annually since 1992. There’s clearly a fanbase. And judging by the amount of prose both in comic form and cinematic, someone somewhere figures there must be money in it and if done right, it could be relevant.
In 2021, a major production would finally take root. If the trailers were any indication, this was going to be a bloody mess in a good way. Well, in a way that appeals to people who are into bloody messes anyway. I confess, I’m not really one of them.
The generation of modern gamers are well into their 40’s today and that demographic is obviously populated and established enough to generate major profits for an R rated movie based on a video game. Yay us!
Mortal Kombat movie (2021) had a decent number of recognizable characters but chose to focus on a new character. A strange choice. It forced the audience to watch this person no one knows or cares about in lieu of the characters people really wanted to see.
Thankfully Kano shows up to steal the show. Kano is a foul-mouthed Australian who shoots lasers from his right eye. What’s not to love? Kano’s signature banter is a breath of fresh air compared to the staunch seriousness of this film. It creates a decent balance between epic dire exposition and playful levity which ultimately culminates into a pretty good film, with or without extreme violence.
In this case, it’s with. Very much with! Kung Lao has a razor-brimmed hat and he’s not bashful about using it. Imagine Harold Sakata throwing his bladed derby in Goldfinger (1964) but instead of statues losing their heads it’s… actually, don’t. Don’t imagine this. Nevermind.
Mortal Kombat 2021 movie had a pretty exciting climax after all, even if it centered around a noob no one wanted to see (Instead of Noob Saibot, a Noob I’m sure someone wanted to see). My biggest gripe about it is they don’t even get to the tournament. The tournament is the whole point of Mortal Kombat and we just spent an entire film in a training montage! Okay, it wasn’t a montage but it was training!
Now that I mentioned it, I’d love to watch a training montage that spans the whole 1hr45m runtime of a film… especially if it was an 80’s training montage.
If they had filmed the first at the same time as the second and cranked these films out back to back, even a year apart, I think I would have accepted a prologue film better. Or better yet, come out with the tournament film first and THEN do a prequel film. But this made me relate to those people who watched Fellowship of the Ring without knowing there were still two more installments coming.
“What!?! I sat through three hours of this and we’re only a third done?”
These characters wouldn’t get to the actual tournament for another five years! Part of that wait may have been due to a particular illness that we had to deal with in those times. Not going to name names.
I saw Mortal Kombat II (2026) BEFORE I finally saw all of Annihilation (1997) and I have to say, MKII is definitely a better sequel than MKAnnihilation. But that’s not saying much. That’s like saying a full body massage is better than being hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer.
In the games, the character Liu Kang seems to be the “Everyman” stand-in on whom players of the game are meant to project themselves (even while you may play as almost any character. Liu Kang is a well-rounded character possessing a decent balance of offensive and defensive maneuvers. As such, however, he can be a bit of a blank slate in the movies and I think the previous films suffered by focusing on Liu.
Two other “good guy” main characters I always found rather bland: Sonya Blade and her partner Jax. Sonya is a special agent of some sort. Never cared to look into it really.
Jax is another agent person guy who can’t seem to decide from one storyline to another whether he has arms, has enhanced techno arms built over his regular arms, or has no arms and the enhanced techno arms are his replacements. I suppose if I actually knew a person with this predicament I might count them as interesting but as for the movies and games, this is just a point of contention I couldn’t care less about.
Back in Annihilation, I thought everyone was being really mean when they were telling Jax his robot arms were his weakness. I was like “Give the guy a break! He’s handicapped!” When his robot arms fell apart in that film, I was shocked to see he still had regular arms! If you ask me, there’s nothing more despicable than a person who fakes being handicapped just so they can get free robot arms.
Then we come to Johnny Cage. Ironically I always thought he was kind of lame in the games but in the movies his complexity shines. Played by the incomparable Karl Urban, Johnny Cage presents all the trappings of has-been fame and unrecognized genuine martial arts prowess. His lovable arrogance only thinly veils his heart of gold and Urban presents these aspects flawlessly. What might have been a relatively boring montage of fights, Urban makes thoroughly enjoyable. Frankly I wish the previous installment had this much fun! And we get Kano back to boot! Bonzer!
The game lore has been a constantly retconned soap opera of which I can neither make heads nor tales despite my best efforts. But at the end of the day, the story of Mortal Kombat is just a flimsy pretext for a bunch of 1v1 fights between a myriad of unique characters and on that front Mortal Kombat II the movie delivers ten times out of ten.
It seems to me like the filmmakers may have finally realized what people want with this. I compare it to Godzilla or p0rň. No one is really interested in the story. They just want to see giant monsters or naked people shoot atomic breath at each other and knock over major landmarks.
Mortal Kombat II dropped a few mandatory hints as to storyline here and there but mostly we just saw one interesting fight after another. I got my money’s worth. I went home satisfied, crawled into bed with the missus, knocked over a major landmark. It was a fine evening.
Best of all it was moderately violent. I mean the film was moderately violent. The evening was actually quite uneventful aside from the movie and the major landmark thing I mentioned.
Everyone got what was coming to them. Some of it was horrible, some of it was grotesque, but it all stayed in the realm of tongue-in-cheek “action movie” style violence. None of it was beyond my threshold in the situations presented. But it wasn’t PG-13 cutaways and insinuations either.
Meanwhile the videogames grow more and more horrific as current MK producer NetherRealm Games grasps who their audience is. It’s no wonder the MK games are incorporating popular 80’s horror psychopaths and heroes as special guest downloadable playable characters. They’re not canon, obviously. Just a novelty. I don’t really want to see Freddy Krueger and RoboCop in an official MK film. Please don’t do this.
Between these last two films there came a handful of animated features in which I am genuinely interested for better or worse. Honestly I’ll likely see all that is available even the older lesser known stuff. But that will be for another Non-review.
Until then…
A Side Note About the Theme Music: All over the internet the claim is made that the fast-paced techno song was produced by techno/rap group 2 Unlimited in 1992, a year before the very similar Mortal Kombat Theme came out, attributed to The Immortals. I don’t know what the answer is but I am surprised no one in these threads ever mentions the song “Stylophonia” by Two Little Boys which came out in 1991. Who made this song first!?! It’s Baffling! Have a listen:
Mortal Kombat Theme by The Immortals (1995)
Twilight Zone by 2 Unlimited (1992) [warning: song starts with the most annoying sound ever created]:
Stylophonia by Two Little Boys (1991):
Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity 
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