By I am a fan of Mortal Kombat in the way that I imagine most normal people are. It was the badass fighting game that all of the cool older kids had. Eventually, one of your parents’ friends said “Fuck it” and got it for them. You’d go over to their house and play until three in the morning; maybe you finally nail your first fatality by midnight. I know most of the characters, but they really are just archetypes. Liu Kang is Bruce Lee. Johnny Cage is Bruce Campbell. Baraka is … Baraka. Kinda one-in-a-million, that one. I more or less skipped the cutscenes during my brief forays into “Story Mode,” during that brief period of most sleepovers where the whole family is yelling.
And I am a fan of action movies in the truest sense of the word. I saw MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III in theaters and it blew my 10-year-old mind. Then we saw CASINO ROYALE. My obsession with spies quickly found its way to martial arts. Jackie Chan’s American run of THE TUXEDO, THE MEDALLION, SHANGHAI KNIGHTS, and RUSH HOUR 3 exposed me first. I could not believe what I was seeing. By the time THE RAID 2 came out, high school me was sitting in the 20-seat room at the San Diego indie theater with two sicko buddies, barely able to contain screams during every painful moment of that kitchen fight. I often compare action movies to professional sports. When you are witnessing a masterfully executed fight scene, cinema becomes ballet. It is certainly preferable that an action movie have a compelling story, but it is not a requirement. Get me to whatever crazy stuff you shot.
All of this should make me an ideal mark for MORTAL KOMBAT 2, a gruesome kung fu spectacle that mortifies the audience with fanciful kills straight out of a slasher flick. That’s an easy sell. The fact that it’s based on that fun game I played, all the better! In theory …
Video game movies are clearly shifting into the new wave of mass popularity once held by superhero films. Gen Alphas who grew up parented by screens yearn to cry “CHICKEN JOCKEY!” in MINECRAFT. Gen Z briefly turned The Last of Us into a sensation through a morbid desire to re-experience the story’s inflicted pain. Millennial parents put THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS MOVIE on those very same screens for their children because they remember smiling at their Nintendo DS on the school bus. The games industry is on a stratospheric streak (despite being perhaps the most corrupt and careless of all the entertainment professions), imprinting on the cognitive development of millions while we all play to remember happier days. It’s big tech, after all.
It wasn’t always this way. Video game adaptations were once one of pop culture’s most despised ugly step-children. The reimaginings of crunchy early console hellscapes like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Far Cry, Postal, and Bloodrayne were all given to one horrible German named Uwe Boll. This guy was so chronically bullied by film critics that he staged a boxing match to fight them. At best, they were B-movies. Paul W.S. Anderson built a schlock empire with the seven-film Resident Evil saga, which essentially plays free jazz with the famed survival horror game’s lore and characters, mostly telling the story of Alice, a character that Paul put in the film because his wife could play her. I love love. Occasionally, you’d get something like SUPER MARIO BROS., which re-imagines the mushroom kingdom as a cyberpunk dystopia for two plumbers.
None of these films ever truly captured the essence of the games. Every so often you’d get a TOMB RAIDER that has Angelina Jolie—a real action star—flipping around and shooting guys in Lara Croft’s outfits and poses. Agreeable. Still, watching her clumsily jump through tombs just isn’t as exciting as staging the jumps yourself. Even at their best, it was clear that the actors did not understand the material they were adapting. This was the generation that jumped off the train once the graphics went 3D. They liked the idea of it. Jake Gyllenhaal genuinely sat down and thought to himself, “I’d be a great Prince of Persia.” Passion was lacking and few who were truly enjoying video games at that time were in the room. They were in their childhood rooms playing Xbox.
The MCU comes along. Geek shit is suddenly is profitable. Right around here, David Bowie’s director son Duncan Jones (MOON) decides to make his passion project, WARCRAFT, an adaptation of the massively multiplayer online game that had millions of closeted gay dungeonmasters glued to their desktops. It realizes the world of … *Googles* … Azeroth through an overwhelming CGI aesthetic ripped from Blizzard’s expansion pack trailer style. The orcs looked particularly accurate to me (I remember them from the box). The characters and lore are taken very seriously and … Boy, is it boring. Stiff. I kept imagining skipping scenes so that whatever I was supposed to actually be doing or seeing would start. By the time we got to whatever effects-ridden battle ended the film, it all just went by in a flow of ones and zeroes. With that film, Jones created a genre that would eventually surpass him in popularity by miles: The Cutscene Movie.
A “cutscene movie” can simply be defined by asking, “Were the people making this allowed to change literally anything from the game?” This abusive dynamic was cemented in 2019 when the trailer for SONIC THE HEDGEHOG was released. The titular critter was not the looker he is in the beloved game series; he was a creature far more befitting the film he was in. Cruddy. Half-baked. They remade the Russell Brand Easter Bunny movie, HOP, with Sonic and didn’t even bother to switch out James Marsden. YouTube comments were relentless and furious. It was dead on arrival. Desperate, Paramount asked the animators (very politely, I’m sure) to completely re-design Sonic in every single shot of the film until he was a perfect copy. That massive change made these fans so powerful that they claimed an unbearable film as a perfect adaptation simply because bullying worked. We’ve dredged through three wildly popular SONIC films where everything from the games besides the quirk and personality is rendered on screen with perfect fidelity. It doesn’t matter that Sonic has about two coherent personality traits to his name: The kids in your lives are growing up with him as their Shrek. They’ll only know Jim Carrey from his scenes free-associating as Doctor Eggman.
It’s only bleaker when we start shifting to allegedly adult-skewing properties like MORTAL KOMBAT 2. The 2021 reboot that it follows was one of the first films people could safely see in a movie theater in the wake of the COVID pandemic, in addition to being available to stream same-day on HBO Max as part of Warner’s ill-fated “Project Popcorn.” Despite this, it is one of the most anonymous and unmemorable films in the history of the medium. The occasional human PNGs of Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Jax, and the like wander around the screen, occasionally throwing hands in some of the stiffest fighting that you can technically classify as “live-action.”
These movies are not truly in pursuit of cinema. They’re aiming to re-create the “cinematic trailers” that these games would drop in the lead-up to launch. Watching two clumsily rendered performance-capture crash test dummies jankily throw After Effects workflows at each other does not provide the same thrill as playing the game itself, let alone a full-length motion picture. You can practically feel the nitpicky late-night Slacks from game developer NetherRealm landing in the inboxes of dozens of underpaid Warner Brothers visual effects artists. All of them are trying to do their best, I’m sure, but it’s hard to have too many ideas when your fight sequences have to be scientifically engineered around each character hitting a certain pre-rendered move. It has to look as close to the game as possible, so it can’t look real. It can’t look like it hurts. Scorpion cannot hurl his spiked chain out with a furious exaggerated gasp and scream, “GET OVER HERE” as he yanks Sub-Zero in for the uppercut. He has to stand flatly on two feet and shoot his chain out in a straight line while the analogue recording of the original “GET OVER HERE” from the game that some guy recorded on a potato in the early ‘90s plays over it. That’s what the fans want to see.
Apparently, the fans want to see Karl Urban play Johnny Cage, the washed-up movie star. I don’t buy it. Sure, Urban was once a compelling and eccentric character actor who could’ve developed a Campbell-level cult following had he continued his outstanding character work in LOTR, the Star Trek reboots, and even DREDD. Instead, he took a steady streaming gig on Amazon’s The Boys as Billy Butcher, a somewhat charming, angry mercenary who speaks entirely from a 13-year-old’s mouth after drinking their first beer. It was a great performance in the first season, but now he’s on autopilot. He brings that autopilot to Johnny Cage. This is a guy who has learned that the key to starring in modern IP blockbusters is to hit your marks and deliver every line like you’re trying to salvage a failing comedy set. Cage is certainly more engaging and charming than returning charisma vacuums Sonya (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kano (Josh Lawson), and Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) by sheer participation. Every moment these lost causes are on screen is pure pain; working actors clocking in and clocking out, nothing behind the eyes.
Nobody talks in these films. Not really. The Netflix-era formula of making characters strictly espouse plot-summarizing dialogue for viewers looking at their second screen thrives in “cutscene movies.” That’s what cutscenes are, especially in fighting games like Mortal Kombat. The game sets a certain mood to make you go “OoOo” while scrolling on your phone until the moment you can start interacting with the controller. This does not translate to movies, a medium that demands that every second that makes it onto that theater screen be hard-won. Crafting film characters cannot stop at the costume. They have to be evocative, with traumas, flaws, and opinions. MORTAL KOMBAT 2 does the bare minimum, establishing that some of these traits technically exist within these characters’ minds, but that’s about where it ends. These action figures cannot get dirty. They’re built to regurgitate the game’s lore and walk towards the next fight sequence.
The fandom of these games is allegedly hardcore. They portray themselves as the freaks who can handle the gory fatalities. If they truly were wired that way, they would not be satisfied with an adaptation that does everything possible to dull all of the genre elements that should be carrying the day here. I cannot help but imagine the film that producer James Wan (the mastermind behind SAW and THE CONJURING) might’ve brought us if he were in the director’s chair. Something where you’d watch two live-action stuntmen break every pretend bone in their bodies (and a few real ones) trying to pull off Liu Kang’s bicycle kick followed by a jawbreaking fatality brought to life with big-budget practical effects. Ideally, a Mortal Kombat movie should feel a bit like THE FLY, where you think “damn, I couldn’t have even imagined the body breaking this way” every time a character dies. Instead, they’re beaten to a plain, pre-rendered pulp that inspires only relief. That scene is over, which means that we can move on to the next, all one step closer to the credits.
I understand being passionate about a niche that meant a lot to you. I’m sure plenty of formerly teenage boys spent time pouring over the franchise’s cutscenes and immersing themselves in that world. I may think it’s silly, but they’d probably roll their eyes at plenty of movies I love. What I don’t understand is being so inherently satisfied with and defensive about a product that exists simply to pledge loyalty to those who are keeping the lights on at NetherRealm Studios. CCO Ed Boon even cameos in the first act. You get a passive experience that sort of looks like something you could’ve played at home. MORTAL KOMBAT 2 is the modern equivalent of a TV sitcom getting a theatrical film, but far more befitting for the antisocial simulation of 2026. Perhaps that’s just it. Times are simply so terrible right now and people are literally craving for anything that can take them to a different year. This is “for the fans” in the same way that a cigarette break is for your mental health—a familiar, mild poison to alert the body that it is still alive.
CAPITALISM WINS.
FATALITY.
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