Mortal Kombat is not just too long for a movie based on a fighting video game; it’s actually too dumb to even be a movie based on a fighting video game. On the one hand it does a Resident Evil, introducing a new character and making him the hero, instead of giving this role to an already established character – preferably one that is, you know, popular among the franchise’s fan base.
And on the other hand, it dips into the same old MK well, kicking off with the Hanzo Hasashi Family Massacre – Kombat’s equivalent of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. Only last year the animated Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge covered the exact same ground, and did it a lot better. The intertitle that follows the prologue confirms that we are not about to see anything new (Earthrealm blahblahblah Tournament blahblahblah Outworld blahblahblah).
MK21 contains exactly (sub)zero surprises. The first time we see Jax, we know he is going to lose his original arms and have them replaced with cybernetic prosthetics (the only surprising thing about this is that the character's first replacement arms are quite underwhelming. Jax eventually gets something more in line with what we’re used to; the question is, why does the movie do in three steps what it should do in two?). Similarly, Kano's true, treacherous nature is no secret.
We already know all this. We know it like the backs of our hands. If we don't know it from playing the game, we know it from watching the 1995 movie – speaking of which, MK95 is 10 minutes shorter (it wasted little time with pre-Tournament antics, and it didn’t even bother with a Training Montage; in contrast, MK21 includes what is best described as a tutorial, not the way you want to go about evoking a video game feel), which is to say 10 minutes better. It also had better effects; its Goro was clumsy and awkward – something like the Cryptkeeper on stereoids – but when Johnny Cage punched him in the balls, I felt it. Conversely, when Cole (Lewis Tan), the aforementioned brand-new character, fights Goro in MK21, it’s like he’s shadowboxing, and his shadow happens to be a four-armed man-mountain of pixels.
All things considered, what’s the point of watching a movie where we can anticipate every important event, and anything we don’t see coming a mile away turns out to be unnecessary? For example, it's cool – pun intended – when Sub-Zero makes it hail, but that’s just a gimmick – nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
