Writers: Greg Russo, Dave Callaham, Oren Uziel
Cast: Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Joe Taslim, Mehcad Brooks, Matilda Kimber, Laura Brent, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada, Chin Han, Ludi Lin, Max Huang, Sisi Stringer, Mel Jarnson, Nathan Jones, Daniel Nelson
Runtime: 110 mins.
2021
"He's extremely integral to the plot," [producer] Garner said. "He is a beloved character. He's awesome. He's obviously somebody that I would love to have in every movie. He's also really expensive. Not going to lie. He's really expensive. So again, if somebody wants to give me a billion dollars to go make a Goro movie, I'll make a Goro movie. I'll love that. Every second of him is a lot of money. Every second was like my house. So you got to use him sparingly, you got to be smart about how you use him. It's not that we don't love him, it's not that he's not hugely important. It's just practically, he's so damn expensive."
This quote provides a uniquely forthcoming depiction of the deranged way in which some producers approach filmmaking. The commodification mindset evident here penetrates every aspect of the production: the characters, the visuals, the story. Mortal Kombat is the sallow progeny of a deranged, unfocused video game series and an entirely cynical production process. It shows.
One of my viewing mates posed a question halfway through the film that stuck with me-- Why does this have to be our world? Instead of having regular dudes stand around vacantly while being told that there are secretly a bunch of different universes and monster creatures who all like to fight each other (but it's a secret don't tell), they could have created a full-fledged fantasy world in which all of these colorful characters could inhabit a fantastic space. That would require a production to bother with functional worldbuilding, both in terms of scriptwriting and creative budgetary solutions. Why this movie happened this way becomes disappointingly, economically clear. Maybe the better question is, How can we stop it?
There is so much potential for heightened camp in a franchise like this. As another viewing mate put it, If only they had brought as much intensity as the characters in 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.' Instead, we watch our protagonists argue about nothing and allude vaguely to stuff that might happen in the sequel. It feels like staring at a character selection screen.
This can't entirely be blamed on the actors, who are indeed boring and terrible. Only Josh Lawson as Kano registers, and it's by trying his best to crank his obnoxiousness to an incredible degree. It may be the fault of casting. It's definitely the fault of Director Simon McQuoid (lol) whose work here is livid with disinterest. But it's probably especially the fault of the cabal of screenwriters, whose characters are given no motivations other than, occasionally, survival. This produces a complete lack of drama, tension, or audience investment in whatever nonsense is going on. Good drama doesn't care if the world is ridiculous, as long as the characters who inhabit it are given wants and desires that conflict in exciting ways with other characters' wants and desires. In Mortal Kombat, there is a violent fight between Kano and the awful Sonya (Jessica McNamee) for no reason I could discern beyond 'they were kind of on each other's nerves.' Just as quickly as the brutal fight began, they walked away bored as if it had never happened.
In video games, it's fine to create protagonists who are primarily textural, because in the act of playing we infuse our own interiority and desires into the character. In film, a passive medium, we need our characters to be full vessels. Kombat's heroes are empty, nothing more than a pose and a catch phrase. It's so bad that whenever characters finished their lines and padded off camera, it began to seem to me that the actors were just wandering off to their trailers. For God's sake, when the main character Cole (Lewis Tan) gets the opportunity to go through a magical portal for the first time in his life, he just saunters through it with his head down. He saunters.
The fights are somewhat redeemable. At least, it's clear that they're the product of good choreography and second unit directing work. They mostly get hacked to shit by the editing though, to the point where we wondered if certain cuts were somehow accidental. Anyway, here are some more things that happen.
There's a part where the heroes get together to come up with a plan to fight the bad guys, but it turns out by 'plan' they literally just mean 'deciding who fights who.'
There's several sequences where the heroes prove themselves and discover their innate superpowers. For Jax (Mehcad Brooks), this involves his new but shitty prosthetic robot arms morphing into bigger cooler arms. For Cole, it means growing a cool shirt.
There's a moment when a sinister helmeted enemy sees his sorcerer friend about to do his finishing move on someone else, and he says with glee, Looks like he's about to get his soul sucked.
This last one, actually, is the only good part of the film, and the rest of Mortal Kombat could have stood to learn a lot from it.
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