Get over here! After just over five years, Mortal Kombat II is finally here. I was of the mind that the first film in this rebooted timeline wasn’t bad, a deeply flawed but fun movie overall, bogged down by a boring lead and a lack of actual Mortal Kombat, but decent action and fun kept it afloat. So, does the sequel learn from the mistakes of its predecessor, or is it more of the same? Let’s find out.
The first thing that is apparent in this sequel is that Cole Young is very much not the lead this time around (but he is in the movie). One of the biggest criticisms levied against Mortal Kombat 2021 was that its lead was bland and uninspired, and considering the wealth of original characters to pull from, why did they create their own character with no fan attachment? This time around, we have longtime fan favourite Johnny Cage as the lead, played here by Karl Urban. Unlike his traditional persona in the hit video games, this Johnny Cage is a bit of a has-been. No longer an A-list celebrity, he’s relegated to signing autographs at conventions, reminiscing about the glory days. That is, until Raiden and Sonya show up to recruit him to be a champion for Earthrealm, filling in the slot for the recently deceased Kung Lao. Johnny provides most of the film’s humour, and a lot of it works quite well! This movie leans far more into the campy and silliness of the Mortal Kombat franchise, and compared to the previous entry, it seems to be having a lot more fun with itself. Which, honestly, was the right move. Mortal Kombat, the games, have straddled the line between ultraviolence and zany cartooniness for some time now, and the movie feels all the more entertaining for sliding into that side of things. Johnny, in particular, shines when he has someone to bounce off of, which, in this movie, ends up being Kano and Baraka.
But while Johnny may be the protagonist of the film, the heart and soul of the story really belongs to Kitana (Adeline Rudolph). She’s the princess of Edeina, which has been subjugated by the film’s villain, Shao Khan. In fact, the story revolves around her so much so that I’m surprised she wasn’t the protagonist, considering she’s more or less the main character in terms of emotional investment. She shares a lot of scenes with both Jade (Tati Gabrielle), her bodyguard, and her adopted father, the aforementioned Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford). Kahn is a pretty solid villain in the movie, offering up a hulking and terrifying mass who moves quickly and without remorse. But he’s really just more of an obstacle for the heroes to overcome, which tracks for a movie based on a fighting game.
When it comes to the fights, Mortal Kombat II is a bit of a mixed bag. Some fights are a bit rough, mainly thanks to the fighters in question being played by actors instead of fighters. So some fights did feel a bit janky, both in terms of the choreography and the editing. Perhaps most rough being the fight between Kitana and Johnny, which was chock-full of jump cuts and weird staging. But other fights were awesome, and one in particular ranks as a genuinely amazing martial arts fight. It was just the right length, visually unique, and creative in its choreography. The fights have plenty of moves pulled straight from the games, and in general, there’s great camera work that frames the action nicely, making it easy to follow what’s going on. The movie also does a good job of making some fights look like a face-off from the games, down to the camera angles and staging. I did have the impression that they toned down the gore and fatalities this time around, though, which was a bummer. The number of people who simply get impaled in this movie is way higher than you’d probably expect, which makes some of the kills feel redundant and uninspired. I’d say there was really only one or two really creative fatalities, and nothing was as violent as the hat saw kill from the previous Mortal Kombat film (but one came close).
Where Mortal Kombat II struggles, I found, was in the edit. This movie is less than two hours long, and I felt more than a few times that there were extensive scenes missing. It created a choppy feeling from time to time, in an otherwise brisk runtime. Characters would disappear, sometimes for extended periods, and transitions between scenes felt clunky at times. I think the movie could have benefited from an extra fifteen or twenty minutes on the runtime. There’s an awful lot of characters in this movie, and the movie just doesn’t have enough time to juggle all of them, which results in many characters getting sidelined, including Kano, who, much like the last film, steals every scene he’s in. Looking online quickly, there’s eighteen characters in this movie, and it does feel like that may have been too many to handle. And while I know this is an R-rated film and, as such, was given a smaller budget, the CGI on MKII was a bit distracting at times. I got over it, but some scenes did feel like they got less polish.
Mortal Kombat II isn’t redefining the video game adaptation, nor can it be called a great movie per se. But it’s a really fun, dumb movie. I laughed, and I was entertained, despite its shortcomings. There’s a lot of love for the video games in this movie that will make fans happy, and it’s a much more amusing and fun movie than its predecessor. I do think that MK 2021 did some things better, but overall, this movie feels like a more coherent and focused movie than what came before. More importantly, it feels more like Mortal Kombat. Would I watch another one of these dumb things? There’s only one thing to really say to that: get over here!
