Directed by:
Simon McQuoid
Written by:
Greg Russo, Dave Callaham
Cast:
Lewis Tan, Joe Taslim, Jessica McNamee,
Hiroyuki Sanada
Cinematography:
Germain McMicking
Is the classic MK song in there?:
Movie
critics just won’t get it.
Movie
critics won’t get us.
They need
the movie to follow a pattern, to follow the rules. They take movies (and, of
course, themselves) super seriously, it’s all about the message and the
aesthetics, but not just any aesthetic: the approved aesthetics. “Is your movie
too violent? Then The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, Scarface and Predator 2 get
the boot. Bad movies. Don’t go see them. That movie that just came out, the one
with the gloved killer, A Nightmare on
Elm Street, do you know you’re a bad person if you’re into that? You’re
supporting the fictitious butchery of fictitious people and you should feel
bad. Do we really need all that gleeful blood in Robocop? That movie, The
Thing, by that Carpenter, why does it have to be so nihilistic? And don’t get
me started on From Dusk Till Dawn. It
has the trifecta: Sex, violence and no
message.”
They
criticize and, ten years later, revise their opinions. “Yeah, The Thing wasn’t so bad. That Scarface, there’s some good stuff in
it.”
Yeah? You
concluded that all by yourself, Mr. Big Brain?
Right
now, movie critics all over the internet are saying that the new Mortal Kombat movie, which just came
out, is flashy, but where’s the message?
Which
goes to show you that, once again, they’re like Donny Kerabatsos: Out of their
element. We, you and I, grew up with this shit. At a certain time, it was our
lives; we lived, breathed Mortal Kombat, and
we know it by heart. The first movie was full of issues and production
problems, but it was also fucking fun, and that reigns over everything else.
The second movie is so bad that it killed the possibility of a franchise for 20
years. Critics, of course, hate them both. They don’t get it, and they’re not
here on this Earth to get it. This one is for us. The territory of geeks,
freaks, and fans.
Mortal Kombat is the adaptation of
a videogame whose name you’d never guess, and it’s about people fighting each
other to the very gruesome death. It’s 50% Enter
the Dragon and 50% Big Trouble in
Little China, fantasy mixed with martial arts and a very detailed mythology
that’s sort of secondary for your enjoyment.
The first
movie, from 1995, liberally follows the plot of the first game, so this
offering by Simon McQuoid (his first feature) stays away from that as much as
possible (and from Scorpion’s Revenge, the
very good animated movie). This is not a remake in any shape, way or form:
instead of a tournament set-up that we’ve seen so much that we can predict its
beats, the evil plan of Shang Tsung is all about killing the good guys before the Mortal Kombat tournament
occurs. The oppressive forces of Outworld have won nine tournaments, and they
need to win just one more to take complete control of the Earth forever. And if
you kill the Earth chosen, then you win by default.
 |
| Kano, the breakaway role of the movie. |
Instead
of launching a massive offensive with armies and shit (which actually comes to
pass in the third game), Shang Tsung has hired killers that hunt our boys—and
gal. Chief among the heroes is an entirely new character, Cole Young, who I
guess is here to have shit explained to, for all those people watching who need
a primer on this stuff. Of course I’m on the fence about Cole: it’s not that
he’s a bad character, and it’s not like he’s boring. It’s just that, couldn’t
his role be fulfilled by an established character? We didn't really need Cole around here, when so many characters could have been the audience surrogate. And there are quite a few
showing up. For the good side, there’s Cole, Liu Kang (in a portrayal that, for
the first time in my life, gets my interest), Kung Lao, Sonya Blade, Jax,
Raiden and Kano (yeap, the game villain is here on a breakaway role that’s
maybe the best in the whole movie). Against them we have Shang Tsung, Goro,
Mileena, Nitara, Reiko, Reptile, Kabal and Sub-Zero who, played by Joe Taslim, is
a major, major cunting piece of shit,
in the best possible way. The guy does a great job.
There’s
also Scorpion, wonderfully cast in Hiroyuki Sanada, who only speaks Japanese,
except for a phrase we all know and love.
 |
| Bi-Han, the original Sub-Zero, and the actual villain of the movie. |
The movie
runs the risk of too many characters showing up too fast for your brain to
catch up, but it takes its time to develop them. Some are better handled
than others, but when the second half starts, you have a gang on an adventure;
they’re not quite as charismatic as the gang in Guardians of the Galaxy, but it’s millions of years ahead from the
insufferable goons of Suicide Squad.
And there’s heart in the whole thing. You want them to win. You’ll cheer at their victories and curse at their failings.
The fight
scenes are fun, and the fatalities are fucking wonderful. It’s such a nice wave
of fresh air to have a shamelessly violent movie coming out in this day and
age: people curse, swear, and loses limbs, and you can see the bits of bone
protruding from the stumps. There are action movies released today with lots of
gunfights and martial arts, and not a fucking single drop of blood—of course,
because too much of the red stuff and your rating goes from PG to R, limiting
the demographic that you can sit in a movie theater. That’s why we get a Robocop that’s a safe movie for the
whole family, and The Predator, and
abomination that the less we speak of, the better.
You know
the chop-socky movie I just reviewed, The Five Deadly Venoms? Back then I said that Deadly Venoms triumphs because it knows what type of movie it is,
and it knows what the audience expects of it (the Friday the 13th movies are genius at this, too). The
same goes for Mortal Kombat: it has
no pretentions of being something it’ll never be. Critics ignore that and complain about how frail the plot is, forgetting that
this genre has never been particularly elaborated. The golden cow of martial
arts movies is Enter the Dragon, a
flick about a martial arts tournament in an island, from a guy with a claw for
a hand, where you have a secret agent fighting, while also trying to dismantle
the criminal enterprise behind the whole thing. And people treat that shit like
it’s Goodfellas.
I don’t
expect a whole fucking lot from the plot in a Mortal Kombat movie, because I know the source material very well,
and I expect the screenplay to insult my intelligence—and I embrace it. As a
fan of exploitation movies, and as a Mortal
Kombat fan, I spent the 110 minutes smiling and chuckling, and by the end,
I wanted more. There’s the potential for this thing to become a full-blown
cinematic universe. Off the top of my head:
·
Fire & Ice: Scorpion
and Sub-Zero;
·
Shaolin Monks: Liu
Kang and his faction;
·
Special Forces: Sonya
and her faction;
·
Shadows of Outworld:
Kitana and Jade.
There’s a
zillion of characters to fill those movies and Mortal Kombat sets it up well, while being a pretty fun ride itself.
Here’s hoping the movie makes good money, because it’s the only way we’ll see
these things blooming.
Of course
the critics won’t like it, but that’s part of the fun.
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