![]() ![]() Jessica McNamee makes for a good Sonya Blade, essaying the right amount of toughness without it crossing over into parody. While Lewis Tan is an adept martial artist and is very handsome, he doesn’t have a lot of screen presence. Cole is clearly meant to be an entry point for those unfamiliar with the franchise and very much is a bland, standard issue ‘chosen one’ protagonist who can feel like a fan fiction self-insert character. The Cole character is the source of many Mortal Kombat fans’ reservations going into this. The B-movie feel of Mortal Kombat works against it almost as often as it works for it. ![]() There are times when the movie feels like a weird underdog sports story, with the team of screw-ups trying to take down the reigning champs. We never really get a good sense of the stakes, and for a story in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance, things often feel too casual. While the fights do look good, the movie overall lacks the visual grandeur and spectacle associated with the settings of the games. Mortal Kombat wants to be epic, and it often falls short. McQuoid tosses in Easter Eggs, and the movie seems to fall back on “look, there’s that thing you like!” a little too often. This is tricky to calibrate for any movie based on an existing property. Unfortunately, this movie is sometimes stuck in a no man’s land – neophytes might feel kept at arm’s length by the unwieldy exposition and certain preposterous elements that fans will accept, while hardcore fans might feel that something’s missing. Making a coherent narrative feature film that makes good use of the expected Mortal Kombat roster was always going to be a challenge. Still, we go to a Mortal Kombat movie for the fighting scenes, and there are lots of those. The fatalities are graphic, but probably what long-time fans of the game would consider tame. Unlike the two 90s films, this Mortal Kombat movie has an R (M18 in Singapore) rating, meaning it can revel in the grisly violence that is the games’ trademark. Many of the actors involved have a martial arts background, which helps. The stunt team, led by supervising stunt coordinator Kyle Gardiner, stunt coordinator Jade Amantea and fight coordinator Chan Griffin, assemble action sequences that are plentiful and generally well executed. The Benjamin Wallfisch score includes variations of the iconic original “Techno Syndrome” theme by Oliver Adams Wallfisch’s reworking of the theme was reportedly used by director Simon McQuoid to recruit his cast. Even the most devoted Mortal Kombat fans are hard-pressed to deny that there is a lot of campiness and silliness in the source material, and the movie is often entertainingly silly. The iconography associated with the games and the characters is treated with a degree of reverence, even as the movie never takes itself too seriously, despite initial concerns to the contrary. They might not exactly get there, but there is an eagerness to please that is evident in the film. The people who made this movie seem to have a handle on what the fans want. Training alongside Shaolin warriors Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kung Lao (Max Huang) and the loose cannon mercenary Kano (Josh Lawson), Cole prepares to represent Earthrealm against combatants from Outworld in a mythical tournament – a tournament called Mortal Kombat. After he is discovered by Special Forces operatives Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole is transported to Lord Raiden’s (Tadanobu Asano) temple. Bi-Han/Sub-Zero, who can control ice, has a long-running rivalry with Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whom he apparently killed centuries earlier. Cole is targeted by Shang Tsung (Chin Han), the demon sorcerer of Outworld, who has sent Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) in pursuit of Cole. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) bears a mysterious dragon-shaped birthmark, indicating that he is descended from a line of legendary fighters. Mortal Kombat returns to the big screen in this reboot. The franchise has courted controversy and had a presence in every conceivable form of media, including two theatrically released movies in the 90s. In 1992, the arcade game Mortal Kombat, created by Ed Boon and John Tobias, became a defining entry in the fighting game genre. ![]()
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