Mortal Kombat II: Movie Review

Cast: Karl Urban, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Lewis Tan, Damon Herriman, Chin Han, Tadanobu Asano, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada, Adeline Rudolph Tati Gabrielle
Director: Simon McQuoid

Five years ago, the first Mortal Kombat delivered a movie that pitched perfectly to its core game audience, but did nothing to satiate a general audience and bring in new fans. So in terms of cinematic success, it's almost unthinkable to believe the sequel would double down on what made the first work and yet somehow also prove equally as unqualified in trying to garner a wider audience while threatening an Avengers: Doomsday style sequel at the end.

Yet that's exactly what McQuoid's follow-up does, despite mixing in a story of Kitana's creation (she saw her father killed before Shao Khan, an evil monster enslaved her kingdom) and introducing weary former martial arts expert Johnny Cage (Urban) on whose shoulders the fate of Earth Realm rests.

With a side-story of a MacGuffin about an amulet that grants its bonded wearer immortality, the preposterous levels of Mortal Kombat are set in stone before the very first fight takes place.

Once again, the movie remains faithful to the gameplay and locations, even if some of its choreographed fights are more like dances around the subject. The brutality seems lacking this time around and if anything compared to what can unfold on TV screens these days, it almost seems tame in its execution - particularly for a game famed for its OTT Fatality final kills.

The action is serviceable enough, directed as it is in a perfunctory way by McQuiod as he swirls around characters and takes in the video game-style backgrounds. But in among the CGI fare and taunts, there's little that suggests flair and certainly little that's memorable.

More successful - though once again, very familiar - is the Cobra Kai-style arc of Urban's Johnny Cage, a washed-up fighter turned actor who starred in some questionably bad 80s and 90s movies, such as Citizen Cage, that became cult hits for the wrong reasons. Sidelined at a convention, Cage's weariness and cynicism is expertly captured by Urban, even if in truth, he's played a dialled down version of Billy Butcher from The Boys. 

The film's more enjoyable when it leans on the more humorous edges of the set-up and sequences where Cage has to fight against a multi-toothed creature in a Mad Max-themed dustbowl show glimpses of what the franchise could be if it stopped taking itself just too seriously.

Once again Josh Lawson's Kano gets the best lines. From labelling an albino necromancer a "bleached dildo" to calling him "Pennywise", the chuckles are a welcome addition to a film that just doesn't want to appeal to everyone.

At nearly 1 hour 50 minutes, Mortal Kombat II is a test of patience in many ways. It's not a disastrous video game adaptation and takes what makes the fight series work and transposes it to a big screen. 

It's just that it now risks becoming the kind of movie franchise that Cage himself is mocked for doing - a dinosaur doing a bunch of karate poses - and the fact it looks likely to continue on to a third film is a fatality for any audience wanting some kind of thrill at the cinema.