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Karl Urban Almost Saves ‘Mortal Kombat II’ From Itself
Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
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The sequel to the latest reboot is a surprising improvement and does what the first film couldn’t.
Ahead of the Mortal Kombat II screening, I had to run back the 2021 film, which was the first installment in the third reboot of the video game franchise turned movie series. To be real, I remembered liking the potential of the first film, but the execution just didn’t feel like Mortal Kombat the video game. I don’t want to sound like the current crop of Resident Evil stans who are eviscerating the trailer from Zach Cregger’s upcoming film, but aside from the accurate depictions of each character in the 2021 film, as well as the concept of the tournament between realms being introduced, it felt Mortal Kombat-y to a point.
During a recent press conference for Mortal Kombat II, producer Todd Garner confirmed one of my main fears regarding how Warner Bros. reintroduced this iconic franchise: They didn’t know what they were doing. “Quite frankly, in the first movie, the studio didn’t know what they had,” Garner stated plainly regarding the 2021 film. “So we were in that fighting pit for like 75% of the movie, just because of the budget.” Those pit fights were hell, lowkey, but at the end of my rewatch, I remembered that they teased the character they created for the film, Cole Lang, heading to Hollywood to recruit Johnny Cage, and I thought two things to myself: They need to deliver on Cage, and they need to make this a proper, gorier sequel. With Mortal Kombat II, which hits theaters May 8, director Simon McQuoid improved on the world we inhabit, with Jeremy Slater’s script blending fan service with a story that further sheds light on how Earthrealm and Outworld operate in the cinematic Mortal Kombat universe.
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One of the more noticeable improvements in Mortal Kombat II is the attention paid to the environments each fighter battles within. As the tournament is now underway, there are rounds where a series of competitors are randomly summoned to do battle, placing them in locales that give off a more “from the game” vibe, including the awesome Dead Pool stage from the Mortal Kombat II video game. The film’s opening feels more like a modern Mortal Kombat bout, with townspeople surrounding much of the area where the fighters are battling, and yes, they interact with the stages in ways similar to the games. Shao Kahn, the big bad of this film, is even heard screaming “FIGHT!” and “FINISH HIM!” at the start and end of the bouts. At the screening I attended, which featured full-on Kitana cosplay, the crowd ate it all up. In an era where folks are dancing in the aisles during screenings of Michaelor attending The Minecraft Movie to yell “chicken jockey!,” I can already see kids recreating Scorpion’s “get over here” as they exit the theaters.
And it isn’t just the look and feel of the film. Props go out to Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph, who put the film on their backs as Johnny Cage and Kitana in totally different ways. While many hoped that WWE superstar The Miz would have won the role, “The Boys” star Urban does a fine job embodying the action movie cheese that Cage lampoons, from those wacky catchphrases to those ever-present shades. Kitana, on the other hand, is the heart of the film. Her complicated relationship with Shao Kahn puts her in the middle of the action, and seeing her fans in deadly combat was a highlight.
Yet, just like underwhelming wins in real Mortal Kombat games, the end result ends up feeling as limp as mistimed button mashes, resulting in a wobbly foe just falling backward, no Fatality secured. Once you remove the Johnny Cage storyline and Kitana’s redemption story, you’re really left with another film that is moving toward a sequel without earning it. Without giving too much away, there is one death in particular where, in the middle of the killing, the killer is telling the about-to-be-dead that they will be avenged in the afterlife. No, the killer wasn’t dying at that moment as well, but with lines like that, you just know. Fans of the game could reason that having a necromancer on hand makes it easy to resurrect the fan favorites who spent most of the films as distant memories of the first film’s finale.
In the end, none of that truly matters. Mortal Kombat has never been about the story, even as the franchise has grown up and subsequent video games have become “movies with fighting that you can control that feature engrossing tales.” And, frankly, the theaters need successful mid. You know, the projects that check off an adequate number of desired deliverables that fans of the franchise have. What’s dope is that, when fans are as engrossed in the smorgasbord of fan service Mortal Kombat II provides, you can get bigger, more gnarly kills than you do accurate video game story(re)telling you throw on screen. Mortal Kombat II barely survives sequelitis, but if all goes well at the box office, they’re already prepared for another round.
