Mortal Combat is not a Flawless Victory

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Video game movies have a long history of being horrible and Mortal Kombat stood the best chance of being at least enjoyable, based on the trailers. For the most part, I would say it was an enjoyable movie. People were very divided on how to feel about the movie. Some people were arguing how either the movie was amazing or terrible.

The movie is ok, it’s not great, it’s not bad, it’s just okay. People have to taper their expectations when going into a Mortal Kombat movie. Expecting an amazing plot with deep characters and a rich lore in a single movies just not going to happen. 

The games, however, have really fun and enjoyable lore.

The writers had a single movie to establish the characters, and they are not going to be able to accomplish it with one movie. People have to go into the movie with expectations that this movie is trying to be gory, true to the games, which is just over-the-top action and fatalities galore. I think the movie delivers on that for the most part.

The best characters in this movie are Scorpion, Sub-Zero and Kano. Unfortunately Sub-Zero and Scorpion do not have that much screen time in the movie, but luckily Kano does. Kano is the only character in the film that is really true to the video game counterpart and is done beautifully. Every time Kano was on screen, he was the star of that scene, but besides that, the other characters are not bad, they just feel flat. 

My biggest complaint that the movie follows a new character, Cole Young, who does not have a video game counterpart, which is not the worst thing in the world. If they wanted to make a new character for the movie that is fine. At least make them interesting, he was the most generic and forgettable character that I have seen in a long time. 

There is nothing unique about him at all. He is what happens when someone circles C on the test because they did not know what else to choose, so they choose the most basic answer possible. He is the most run of the mill normal guy in the movie, and the movie follows him as the protagonist for some reason. 

He wants to protect his family and is having a bit of a rough streak with fighting. He used to be amazing at fighting, but has fallen off quite a bit. Then he has to find that courage and rise to the occasion and be the fighter he was born to be.

The movie starts off great. I think the first 20 minutes of the movie was fantastic. Scorpion and Sub-Zero fighting, it’s brutal, it’s bloody, it’s really setting a great tone and then it goes from that to Cole Young. *shudders* 

Another big complaint I have about most of the fights is that there is a lot of cutting. I like fights with long shots and no cuts in between at all so I can see the fighting to the max. Unfortunately most of the fights have a lot of cuts where I can barely tell what is even going on most of the time and is really jarring. The filming for the fighting were not great at all, except for the final fight, I thought that was stunning.

The fatalities and gore was probably the best thing about this movie. There are cheesy lines like “Kano wins” or “Flawless victory” when a character is killed. Those are actually lines said out loud and are pretty goofy. 

Everything else about the movie is fine. The plot gets the viewer from point A to point B. Characters are likable enough, Cole Young being the only wet fart in the movie of a character. The other ones were fun to see come to life on screen, and I thought they were done well.