Review: Mortal Kombat

Image courtesy of New Line Cinema.

Opening with a quote from Immanuel Kant... almost had you there, right? The reboot of the movie franchise of the adaptation of the controversial video game "Mortal Kombat" is neither any better or any worse than you'd expect it to be. It is, however, much more R-rated.

The "Mortal Kombat" films of the 1990s were kitschy and made for a younger audience, whereas this latest version is closer to the video game, I'd imagine - my familiarity with the game is somewhat limited - due to the high quotient of gory, albeit campy, violence. 

I'm not even going to try to compare this new film to the previous ones (I saw the first in 1995 and missed the poorly received sequel) or the video game, so suffice it to say this: "Mortal Kombat" essentially follows the story of a young MMA fighter named Cole Young (Lewis Tan), whose days in the cage appear to be coming to an end due to a string of losses. However, he's tracked down by a fighter named Jax (Mehcad Brooks), who tells him he's among a chosen group of warriors on Earth who must take part in a battle with some otherworldly ninjas - or something like that - for the sake of mankind. Etc.

Prior to all this, the film's main villain, Subzero (Joe Taslim), attacks and murders the family of another warrior named Hanzo (Hiroyuki Sanada) in 17th century Japan, and the feud between the characters' bloodlines informs the tournament into which Cole and several others - a soldier named Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and an Australian mercenary named Kano (Josh Lawson) - have been drawn. As it turns out, Cole is a descendent of Hanzo's bloodline.

The film's middle section brings it somewhat to a halt when Sonya tells of a temple in a mountain where they all can train with the Earth's best warriors and, because it's convenient, Kano knows how to get there. One magical mystery tour and misty mountain hop later, the three of them find themselves being trained by a pair of the video game's most popular characters - Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Shang Tsung (Chin Han), who has a gnarly flying hat.

The point of all the training is for the characters to discover their "arcana" - or special powers - that they'll need for the tournament... which never actually comes. You see, the film's villains have tried to prevent the tournament for reasons much too exhausting to go into here, but the good guys manage to create their own makeshift tournament, in which they show up unexpectedly to challenge an assortment of baddies, which include a woman with creepy fangs, a dude with six arms, an armor-clad fighter, a guy wielding a massive hammer and, of course, Subzero.

To sum up the film's latter third: Much blood is shed. For a movie of this type, it delivers well enough when the old ultra-violence ramps up, but "Mortal Kombat" is otherwise pretty silly. It has some decent enough setpieces, but the aforementioned training session goes on way too long and the plot is so all over the place that you'd likely have to have been a devotee of the video game to know what the hell is going on. Regardless, the film's end sets up the inevitable sequel. The picture has its moments, although by its finale I was ready to shout, "Finish it!"