Review: Mortal Kombat (2021)

The bar for video game-based films is low. The bar for Mortal Kombat-based films is even lower. 

If your only hope going into Mortal Kombat (2021) is that it’s better than Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, well, obviously you’re not going to be disappointed there. Still, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to feel a sense of disappointment once the credits roll. 

It must be said that the fact that Mortal Kombat (2021) has been released at all is a bit of a miracle. Not only is it following Annihilation’s footsteps — which still manages to be a punchline nearly a quarter of a century after its release — but it’s also one of the films that were hit the hardest by the pandemic. Adapting a beloved video game franchise is hard enough, adapting it with a small budget and tight Covid protocols during post-production really put it in a no-win situation.  But here’s the thing — and I know that this is easy for me to say — but it’s not like making a Mortal Kombat movie is rocket science. Nobody is expecting this to have Tarantino-like dialog or Darren Aronofsky’s stylish visuals. This is a film about ninjas, cyborgs, and gods ripping each other’s heads off. Throw in some techno music, cringe-worthy one-liners, and questionable CGI and you have yourself the perfect Mortal Kombat cocktail. Fair or not, that’s what the 1995 film did, and it’s still the standard for video game adaptations all these years later. 

The crazy thing is that Mortal Kombat (2021) has all of that. It has all the ingredients that you need. It just makes some questionable decisions and takes some unnecessary risks that end up not working out in its favor. 

Cole Young

The most glaring of these decisions is the inclusion Lewis Tan’s character, Cole Young. Before release, Cole was seen as the wildcard. The rumors in the Mortal Kombat community were running rampant. Was this a new character? Is he Johnny Cage? Does he turn into one of the more established characters throughout the film? The Mortal Kombat franchise has had its share of ups and down’s over the decades but the one thing that it has never lacked is interesting characters. Surely this movie wouldn’t introduce a new character when it already has so many to choose from, right? Nope. Cole Young is indeed a new character, and he’s not a very good one at that. 

Cole Young is supposed to be our vessel into this new era of live-action Mortal Kombat. He’s the new guy that is there to try and make sense of this whole Earth vs. Outworld nonsense for the casual audience. They could have used Johnny Cage for this or even Striker, but they chose to go a different route. That’s fine. But nothing against Lewis Tan here, he’s just not a character that you can root for. Even shoehorning him in as a descendent of Scorpion doesn’t help. It hurts him even more. We watch Young get his ass kicked the entire movie. When he finally gets his powers — which is literally plot armor — its only purpose is that it allows him to get his ass kicked even more. So when great-great-great-great-great-grandad, Scorpion, pops in to save his great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Cole, at the end of the film, he shows more charisma and badassery in 3-minutes than Cole does in the entire film. 

If we do get a sequel to this at some point, there’s a very large part of me that hopes Cole Young suffers the same fate that Johnny Cage did in the opening of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. 

Mortal Mis-Cast

Mortal Kombat (2021) has the most diverse cast that we have seen in a Mortal Kombat film yet, but the casting decisions lead to some serious head-scratching. This complaint is mainly centered on Raiden and Shang Tsung but they’re so bad in this that it makes the problem seem worse than it might be. When you first see Tadanobu Asano pop up as Raiden in the first 15-minutes of the film, there’s something about him that seems so familiar. Asano’s performance as Hogun in the Thor franchise showed that he’s capable of being a badass, especially in Thor: Ragnarok as he’s confronting Hela in Asgard. His performance as Raiden was one of the things that I was most excited to see in this. 

For as much sense as that choice made, it doesn’t work at any point in this. Raiden is written terribly in this film, and Asano didn’t have a lot to work with, but he also doesn’t come off well as Raiden. He never has that presence. As the leader of Earth’s champions, Raiden should have been the focus here. Whether it was budget-related or just bad writing, he’s a complete afterthought in this.

As for Shang Tsung, what in the hell? Maybe we were spoiled by Cary-Hiryuki Tagawa’s performance as the character in 1995, but Ng Chin Han is woeful in this role. Again, Chin Han is an established actor who has great performances on his resume, and while he’s not given a lot to work with here, he’s the most unintentionally hilarious part of this film. The character design is something that you’re never able to get used to. It’s so low budget and student film-looking that it’s always a distraction. When you tack on the weird effect that they put on his voice and the bad dialog, you get a performance that Chin Han never seems to be comfortable in.

These are the two most powerful characters that were included in this roster and they both come off as anything but.

Round 2: FIGHT?

The one aspect of Mortal Kombat (1995) that hasn’t aged very well throughout these last few decades is the fight choreography. These days, every action movie wants to be The Raid, The Bourne Identity, The Night Comes For Us, or John Wick. Traditional martial arts from the mid-’90s have been replaced with a sloppier, fast-paced, and intensely graphic fighting style. This lends itself well to a movie like Mortal Kombat. The director and producers of the film have even mentioned some of those films as inspirations for their project. Hell, they even hired Joe Taslim to play Sub-Zero. They got the guy that made all of that stuff look so cool. 

Yet, even that doesn’t translate well in this film. We were told by the filmmakers that the actors for this project were chosen because of their intense physical styles and that we would see something unlike we have ever seen before. That’s going to have to remain to be seen because none of that is evident in Mortal Kombat (2021). 

The (Lack) of Story and Character Development

Again, this is Mortal Kombat that we’re talking about here. I don’t need a deep story, I just need an excuse to get these Earth champions over to Outworld so that they can have themselves a good old-fashioned tournament of death. Somehow, that never happens. I still don’t understand how that idea was approved. How do you make Mortal Kombat without a Mortal Kombat tournament? 

Instead of that, the film focuses on Earth’s champions (Cole, Sonya, Kano, Jax, Lui Kang, and Kung Lao) coming together and training for the eventual tournament by trying to beat each other up enough until some sort of superpower-thing happens. Shang Tsung and his Oddworld crew take one look at Raiden’s fighters and laugh knowing that their team’s got this. But instead of going back to Oddworld knowing how bad Raiden’s Earthrealm champions are, they more or less say “fuck the tournament” and try to kill each of the combatants as they’re training. 

It makes no damn sense. 

It’s like the New England Patriots videotaping the Cincinnati Bengals bench in an attempt to steal their plays….Oh, wait. 

Raiden’s absence during all of this is even more maddening. As an elder god, he cannot physically get involved, he says. But in the end, he gets involved. When he’s confronted about it by the others, he gives them a smile and a “heheheh.” Oh! Get it? He could get involved. He was fucking with them so that they had to learn to fight on their own. So glad that Kung Lao got to die for Raiden’s “heheheh” moment. Even Dexter Morgan’s dad was a better Raiden than this guy. 

Shang Tsung is also a pretty shitty leader. His team gets zero development in this. There’s Mileena, who everyone already knows, but Kabal, Reiko, Nitara, and Goro all randomly show up late in the second act with no purpose other than to be used as fodder.  I cannot get over how dirty they did Goro here. Goro, Mortal Kombat’s greatest champion, nerfed to oblivion. 

Even Sub-Zero, who is treated as one of the film’s main attractions, doesn’t have much to do in this movie. By the time Scorpion shows up to finally have their showdown, the movie’s over.

Conclusion

Aside from a few bright spots — Josh Lawson’s performance as Kano, Sub-Zero crushing Jax’s arms, and Kung Lao using his fatality on Nitara — Mortal Kombat (2021) is a bummer. I wanted this to be good. It’s a film that peaks within the first 10 minutes and then gradually declines as it goes along. Is it better than Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was? Sure. But with Annihilation, it’s so bad that it’s sometimes still worth referring back to or booting up once every few years for a quick laugh. If nothing else, it’s memorable. Mortal Kombat (2021) doesn’t even have that. This is a film that I can honestly say that I will likely never watch or think about again.