I have not revisited MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) since at-home-viewing during pre-vaccine COVID times. My review opens by calling it “a perfectly okay movie,” and that’s my memory of it. Good cast, some fun fatalities, but it was a movie I’d anticipated for some time and it was sadly middle of the road. Its attempt to MCU-ify the Mortal Kombat mythology was not terrible, but not nearly as fun as the brazen, brain-damaged approach of Paul Wonder Stuff Anderson’s 1995 version.

MORTAL KOMBAT II comes from the same director (Simon McQuoid) but a different screenwriter (Jeremy Slater, FANTASTIC FOUR 2015, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE), and it’s one of those sequels that’s being made with the understanding that nobody liked the first one very much and they gotta convince everyone this is gonna be different. (How many of those are there, even? Off the top of my head I’m only coming up with GI JOE: RETALIATION.)

They were pretty much required by law to center this one on the titular tournament that strangely didn’t get around to happening during part 1. They also made the two most popular game characters not featured last time into the leads, while the previous non-game audience identification dude becomes just a guy who’s on the team already when they get there. You’d never guess from this that part 1 was all about Cole Young (Lewis Tan, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) unless you pick up on the line that’s there to explain that his wife and kid won’t be in the movie. I like Tan and feel bad he got sidelined, but what they do to his character (SPOILER: squash his head with a giant hammer like he’s one of Gallagher’s watermelons) is really fuckin funny. He takes one for the team.

So this time the story follows Kitana (Adeline Rudolph, HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN), who as a child (Sophia Xu) sees her father (Desmond Chiam, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) defeated/killed by main Mortal Kombat bad guy Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford, BOYKA: UNDISPUTED, ACCIDENT MAN, FINAL SCORE, F9, RED SONJA). So the giant lizard man in the horned skull helmet becomes their ruler, Kitana’s mother (Ana Thu Nguyen, PRIMITIVE WAR) becomes his possessed wife, Kitana becomes his daughter. As an adult she secretly plots with our heroes of Earthrealm to overthrow her conquerer and free her kingdom of Edenia.

Meanwhile, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano, REDLINE, KATE) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee, THE MEG) recruit iconic action star Johnny Cage (Karl Urban, DREDD) to join Sonya, Liu Kang (Ludi Lin, POWER RANGERS), robot-armed Jax (Mehcad Brooks, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH) and Cole to represent Earthrealm in the tournament that they can’t lose or we’re all fucked. Johnny is washed up in Hollywood (they find him being ignored at a fan convention) and keeps reminding them that his fights are fake, but he was once an actual martial arts champion and will reluctantly find his true warrior destiny or whatever while making sarcastic comments.

The Johnny Cage story depicts, let’s say, an alternate reality of ‘90s action cinema. We see the opening scene of his biggest movie, UNCAGED FURY, a New Line Cinema release. It’s powered by corny one-liners, and the fight is definitely choreographed to be silly, and not at all in the style of Jean-Claude Van Damme or his imitators, though otherwise Cage seems to be meant to be their peer. But I think he plays himself in all his movies? The credits are copyrighted 1996, the year after the original MORTAL KOMBAT movie. It does not at all resemble any of the actual New Line action releases that year, which were RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, LAST MAN STANDING, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, BULLET, and SET IT OFF.

This is the same second unit director/supervising stunt coordinator as before, Kyle Gardiner, but the fights felt a little stronger to me. If there’s a difference perhaps it’s the addition of fight coordinator Michael Lehr (EXTRACTION, DAY SHIFT) or editor Stuart Levy (SAVAGES, SNAKE EYES), but maybe the second time’s just the charm. As in many of the best tournament movies, the matches all take place in different places and have a variety of gimmicks based around the characters’ trademark powers, weapons or moves. My favorite is definitely Liu Kang vs. Kung Lao (Max Huang, DRAGON BLADE) because of the latter’s flying saw blade hat and an A++ ending combining gore with melodrama. (HALF SPOILER: Liu Kang sincerely vows to save Kung Lao’s soul from Hell as he brutally ends him.)

Between rounds Shao Kahn and the Earthrealmers fight over a magic amulet that makes him immortal, which is not in the spirit of mortal kombat in my opinion. There’s always gotta be a cheater in a fight tournament.

The 1995 movie is not remotely perfect, but it had such a unique and flagrant style and tone for the time, or any time, that my appreciation for it continues to grow. So I was happy how much this one’s visuals kept reminding me of it – the red and blue lit temples, nest-like wooden Hell bridges, even some of the daylight scenes with little kids running around villages. It feels more like that movie than the first one did, and also more like a game. I love that there are glowing diamonds floating in the air that light up red or blue to represent the remaining team members – a literalization of video game scoring.

It feels like they were ready to accept that this is not a Marvel movie, it’s based on a very specific type of video game and it might as well take advantage of that. The youth may not remember this but there was a genuine moral panic over the cartoonish violence of the original game. It became such a signifier of corruptive influence that Larry Clark had the kids in BULLY playing Mortal Kombat (on acid) to establish how shocking their values are. MORTAL KOMBAT II the movie, therefore, takes death much more lightly than regular movies. It doesn’t always try to get around that the game is one-on-one matches where the loser dies horribly. They’re happy to bring in iconic, beloved characters just to be in one fight and get chopped and splattered into goo.

They’re also not pretending death is permanent. I forgot that the most memorable characters to me, Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada, who since part 1 has been in ARMY OF THE DEAD, BULLET TRAIN and JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 and won a Golden Globe, Emmy and other awards for Shōgun) and Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US) died in the first one. When they weren’t around for a while I got a little worried. What good is Mortal Kombat without some guys wearing the same ninja outfit but in different colors? But this movie has resurrections all over the place, and then Lord Raiden tells the good guys that they have to go to Hell and they’re gonna need a guide and they go to recruit Hanzo Hisashi, a.k.a. Scorpion. We get just enough Scorpion and Sub-Zero action to feel satisfied both that we saw them and that yeah they were pretty well covered before we didn’t really need to get into that too much this time. And yep, I was still happy to hear Scorpion say, “GET OVER HERE!”

(Of course we get our “FIGHT!!” and “finish him” but weirdly I don’t think there’s a “fatality.” I was waiting for it after the climactic death but it doesn’t happen. Now that I think about it I really wonder if they were leaving a space for the audience to yell it. My small Thursday night crowd did not yell it, but did genuinely applaud that and I think two other fatalities.)

I see in my review of the first movie that I made fun of Kano not yet having the robot face. He doesn’t quite get that here, just a magically created eyeball that shoots lasers, but he’s still arguably the best character because Lawson is genuinely really funny, getting laughs most of the times he talks. I particularly like when he realizes he’s not positive about the pronunciation of “Bi-Han.”

Urban is very charismatic and gets some of his own laughs as cocky, cynical Johnny Cage. It’s a different take from Linden Ashby’s straight-up douchey version in ’95, which I think was a good choice. Kitana is a more earnest role, but seeing her kick ass with her metal fans (which are assigned a symbolic meaning that works for me) gave me an unexpected jolt of nostalgia. I saw the movie with a friend I actually casually played Mortal Kombat with in the ‘90s, and we agreed that it reminded us how much we enjoyed playing her character, and that we hadn’t really thought about her not being a memorable enough presence in the PWSA version.

There’s also a new scene-stealer, Baraka (CJ Bloomfield, FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA). Whatever mix of digital and makeup effects they used to make his giant shark tooth grin is very effective, and they get some good monster/human-cultural-differences-comedy going. (Admittedly he reminded me of Trap Jaw from He-Man and got me excited that we’ll get to see an actual Trap Jaw on screen soon.)

I still think the most crucial aspect of Mortal Kombat not properly carried over into these new movies is the aggressive techno music. That’s not strictly from the 1995 film – Mortal Kombat: The Album by The Immortals was released alongside home versions of the game, its theme was a hidden feature on at least one version of the game, it’s inextricable. Mortal Kombat is danceable, that’s canon.

This score by Benjamin Wallfisch is not bad, but not as distinctive as George S. Clinton’s threatening percussion and distorted guitar stings from back in the day, and without the benefit of turning into a rave during the fight scenes. This time they wisely reprise the classic “Techno Syndrome” theme song for the end credits, playfully reworked so that the samples of the character names match the credit order (and include non-game character Cole Young). It really works, reinforcing my belief that each of these movies would be two or three, possibly five or ten times better if they just went all out on the soundtracks. Why the fuck not make us want to dance the whole time? Would somebody be upset by the movie being too awesome? If so, don’t we want to upset that person? I do.

Should the kombat kontinue I strongly believe that they should follow the lead of the TRON series and hire known artists to do a really bombastic and incredible score each time. Not one person on earth ever saw that last TRON movie or can prove it even exists, and yet we all to a person own the NIN soundtrack on vinyl and enjoy listening to it. I see no reason not to go down the list of The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Skrillex, the mouse mask guy, the mouse danger guy – anybody with the time and inclination to make beats that hit harder than Shao Khan’s giant hammer – until they find one with a schedule opening and a soft spot for Mortal Kombat. Shit, somebody got Trent Reznor to do a Ninja Turtle movie. And it was good! There can be an A+ MORTAL KOMBAT soundtrack in the 2020s. We as a society can achieve this.

Until then this new MORTAL KOMBAT series will be pretty disposable, but I’m happy to say that part II did a decent job of fulfilling the potential of a ridiculous movie about monsters and cyborgs shooting lightning and biodaggers and shit as an athletic competition with inter-dimensional stakes. And if we can’t make a watchable movie out of that then what would be the point of anything? For now, Earthrealm persists.