Movie Night: Mortal Kombat (2021)
A slice of kombat nostalgia
I started out wanting to do a retrospective review of the 1994 Street Fighter film as a counterpoint to the newly released Mortal Kombat movie — Street Fighter 2 is the superior of the two epic 90s 2D fighting video games in my opinion — but then I watched the new Mortal Kombat movie and rewatched the old Street Fighter, and yeah, fuck it: Mortal Kombat is a better fighting movie on virtually every level.
There are many reasons to prefer the 1994 Street Fighter (or 1995 Mortal Kombat) to the flashy new flick, most notably the nostalgia from having watched it as a kid. You also certainly can’t beat the star power of the cancer-ridden Skeletor-looking Raul Julia as M. Bison and the coked-to-the-gills maniac Jean Claude Van Damme as Guile. But despite these substantial qualities, it must be acknowledged that the fist fighting in the movie pretty much sucks.
Movie fight choreography and special effects have changed quite a bit in the nigh thirty years since Street Fighter — the massive rise of MMA has played a major role in the changes to cinematic fights — but even in a vacuum without all this hedging and comparison of eras I actually think the new Mortal Kombat movie is pretty good. Not like Citizen Kane good or even Over the Top good, but still a highly entertaining way to spend 90 minutes. I enjoyed it considerably more than the much-touted new Godzilla vs. Kong for a contemporary example.
Kong and Kombat are a useful comparison because both movies get something right; we’re watching these flicks to watch badass fights, not manufactured drama. Both movies largely ignore character-development bullshit, with some exceptions, and give us what we want. The much smaller scale of the Mortal Kombat fights and the fact that (for the most part) two real people were approximately fighting, rather than dozens of doughy CGI technicians frantically typing code or whatever CGI technicians do, gives MK the edge for me over the big computer BANG of two monsters clashing in GvK, which I found dull after about 10 minutes of a 45-minute Lite-Brite explosion.
This first fight of Mortal Kombat may be the best in the movie and is a great example of what I’m talking about. Super minimal set up: dude kills other dude’s family, other dude’s bent on revenge (even from the depths of hell). There’s not a lot of conversation to establish his motivation. We get it. Holy fuck, that’s Scorpion and Sub Zero kicking ass!
The movie is also true to the game I remember parents and politicians being frantic about. In whatever layer of hell John McCain currently resides, he is probably still droning on to the minion imps about the dangers of MMA and violent video games. But yeah, this movie is super gory and bloody. Just like in the game, people get their heads crushed, holes blown open in their chests, spines ripped out, etc. We even get the signature lines like “Fatality” and “Finish him!” The music is well done, as they faithfully remake the original “Mortal Kombat” song by creating a new theme and score in the old 90s techno style.
There’s the pointless bit of introducing a brand-new character in a movie and game franchise stocked full of characters, but it’s also kind of expected to have whatever regular-guy hero struggling to meet his epic destiny. Sorry, I don’t give a fuck about shitty MMA fighter Cole Young or his kid, let’s see some more scrapping, which the film mostly obliges. The wall-to-wall fights however do make the ending a bit anti-climactic. The movie just kind of fades away even as it immediately sets up the sequel of Cole Young’s search for Johnny Cage. Cage is of course an original character from the game who coincidentally JCVD was supposed to play in the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie, but he went with Street Fighter instead.
So yeah, I definitely enjoyed Mortal Kombat. A surprising amount honestly. Of course there are things I could nitpick, but that’s kind of missing the point of the movie, which is watching badass half-magician ninjas have wicked kung fu fights that are over when one of them is sliced in half by a hat.
