110 min | R | April 23, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A cold-blooded ninja, a washed-up cage fighter, and a band of chosen warriors train to defend Earthrealm in a tournament to the death. The fights are brutal and the blood is real. Everything between the fights is filler.
Mortal Kombat reboots the video game franchise around a tournament where Earthrealm’s champions fight Outworld’s monsters to decide the fate of the planet. The film invents a new lead named Cole Young, an MMA fighter who learns he carries an ancient bloodline and a dragon mark that selects him as a chosen combatant. The structure is a string of fights connected by exposition about arcana, powers, and a prophecy. The movie cares about delivering the gory finishing moves the games are famous for. It does not care about giving Cole a reason to exist.
Lewis Tan plays Cole Young as a blank. He has the physical skills to sell the choreography but the script hands him no interior life, and he disappears next to every character built from the game roster. Josh Lawson plays the mercenary Kano with foul-mouthed glee and steals every scene he occupies. He treats the apocalyptic stakes as a joke and becomes the only person on screen having fun. Ludi Lin and Max Huang fight with real precision as Liu Kang and Kung Lao, and Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim turn the Scorpion and Sub-Zero rivalry into the one piece of the film with genuine weight.
Director Simon McQuoid stages the combat with clarity and lets the violence land without cutting away. The fight scenes use practical contact and wide framing so the choreography reads cleanly. The R-rated kills hit with bone-crunching specificity, and the production design renders the realms with cold blue temples and molten interiors. The script by Greg Russo and David Callaham buries this craft under a plot that lurches from one location to the next without rhythm. The movie keeps stopping to explain its own mythology instead of trusting the audience to watch people punch each other.
This is a film that nails the parts fans came for and fumbles everything holding them together. The finishing moves and the fatalities deliver exactly what the title promises. The original protagonist drains energy from a cast that was already complete without him. Mortal Kombat works as a highlight reel of brutal set pieces and fails as a story, and it spends most of its length reminding you which half it got right.