Guy Davis
Mortal Kombat should inspire passion. A misguided, red-haze kind of passion, perhaps, but passion nevertheless. After all, a mystical martial-arts tournament that sees its contenders not merely beaten into submission but incinerated, frozen, eviscerated or decapitated is not the kind of spectacle where one sits sedately on the sidelines, applauding politely at a well-executed combination of blows.
No, the removal of some poor unfortunate’s heart or spine through sheer physical force is cause for celebration, even a full-throated bellow of – scream it with me – MORTALLLL KOMBATTTT!
What it shouldn’t inspire is appreciation at best, ambivalence at worst. And sadly, that’s about all the 2021 reboot had going for it. It had excellent intentions, if very 21st-century entertainment-industry intentions, in constructing lore and backstories and folding those things into a narrative that could become more than the driver of a franchise but a veritable saga. In doing so, however, Mortal Kombat ’21 played it way too safe. It landed strategic blows rather than swinging big or bold, and while a plan might win you the fight, it usually won’t win you the crowd.
Now in a perfect world in which the film industry still churns out Saturday-afternoon programmers, Mortal Kombat fans would have had a sequel – slightly lower budget, slightly lower star wattage – in the multiplex within 18 months. As we all know by now, ‘Move fast and break things’ is a terrible philosophy when it comes to business, but when it comes to lurid chop-socky franchises sequels, it just might be the smart play.
Instead, it’s been four years…but based on the response to the recently released red-band trailer to Mortal Kombat II, hitting cinemas this October, the time correcting course was most likely well-spent. Data gathered by entertainment analytics company WaveMetrix indicates that the Mortal Kombat II trailer was watched 106.8 million times within 24 hours of its July 17 release, making it the most-viewed red-band trailer of all time.
So is it just, as the trailer promises, ‘Strong bloody violence and gore, and language’ that got the fans all fired up? Or is it the return of an everyman protagonist, albeit with one with a little (OK, a lot) more charisma than his predecessor.
One doesn’t want to go too hard on Mortal Kombat 21’s entry-point character Cole Young, or on Lewis Tan, the actor who portrayed him, but it’s fair to say neither lit up the screen. I’m hard-pressed to recall his motivation, his arc or indeed any of his defining traits. He’s back for the sequel, apparently – he may well have been in the trailer, who knows – but the gateway character this time around is MK fan favorite Johnny Cage, big-screen butt-kicker turned legitimate warrior, played by fanboy favorite Karl Urban of Lord of the Rings, Dredd and The Boys fame.
But it’s not only the inclusion of Cage – whose hinted reintroduction at the end of the last movie was probably the movie’s highlight – that has sparked such interest in Mortal Kombat II. It’s that the sequel looks to have recaptured the affectionate but self-aware tone of the first Mortal Kombat movie. The very first Mortal Kombat movie.
“I knew what Mortal Kombat could be,” said Paul W.S. Anderson, director of the 1995 screen adaptation when asked what motivated to take on his first Hollywood production. And while such a phrase may inspire a scoff or a sneer – what could Mortal Kombat be other than men and monsters slugging it out? – it speaks to why the ’95 movie retains its rock-solid fan base while the ’21 version quickly faded from memory.
I can’t claim to know what’s in the minds of the makers of the new movies but it felt as if they had a strategy, a plan. Anderson had a vision. A loud, lurid, lizard-brain vision, sure, but isn’t that what one wants from Mortal Kombat?
To the credit of Anderson and screenwriter Kevin Droney, the movie does its due diligence. It gives its three hero characters sturdy, recognizable motivations to take part in the tournament – revenge for noble Liu Kang (Robin Shou) and fiery Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson, replacing an injured Cameron Diaz!), a chance for slick movie star Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) to prove his bona fides – before they embrace their higher humanity-saving calling, and pits them against adversaries nefarious (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), monstrous (the four-armed final boss Goro, a stop-motion creature straight outta Harryhausen) and just plain gross (the late Trevor Goddard memorably plays one-eyed enforcer Kano as a sleazy barroom brawler).
With the scaffolding in place, all that’s left to do is pit them in a series of scrapes that showcase each character’s brutal skillset and distinctive finishing move against a techno-heavy soundtrack that turned your local theatre into a rave for 90 minutes and change.
Does this make Mortal Kombat ’95 a good movie? Depends on your definition, of course, but it’s certainly an effective one, and even better an enthusiastic one. One senses Anderson’s glee at working in a bigger, brighter sandbox with shinier toys at his disposal. Even if it soft-pedals the gore that made the arcade game so notorious, everything works in concert – the fight choreography, the commitment of the actors and stunt players, that slammin’ soundtrack – to make the viewer of Mortal Kombat ’95 closer to player than observer.
Of course, this could well be the nostalgia talking, and I’m sure that’s a sentiment echoed by many a Mortal Kombat fan. After all, I’m a card-carrying member of Generation X who pumped coin after coin into the arcade game during coffee-and-cigarette breaks from my McJob – one of my mainstay memories of the ‘90s is finally taking down Goro after months of ascending through the MK ranks – and who happily laid down a few more of those coins to catch the game’s carnage on the big screen.
Maybe more than a yearning for yesteryear, that’s the key to Mortal Kombat ‘95’s enduring appeal. The 2021 MK was designed like a console game – a total-concentration immersion into the world and its inhabitants. Anderson’s was designed like an arcade game – an adrenaline-rush diversion.
“Mortal Kombat (1995)” is streaming on HBO Max.
