MORTAL KOMBAT
1995
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Written by Kevin Droney
Once upon a time, video game movies were not a major pillar of the global film box office, and in fact were pretty widely-shunned, in part because, once upon a time, people actually cared whether the movies they paid to see were good. By 1995, there weren't all that many video game movies yet—the very first live-action video game anything was only five years old, this being, according to the histories, a Eugene Levy sitcom based on point-and-click adventure game Maniac Mansion, and well, okay, histories—but the ones that had come out by then had not covered themselves in glory, 1994's Street Fighter making a significant amount of money but perceived as a bafflement by fans and junk by everybody else, while the cracked-out vision of 1993's Super Mario Bros. had lost a significant amount of money with its utterly hostile reception putting Nintendo off movies for the next three decades. (There was, too, a 1994 Double Dragon that must have just barely existed.) But in 1995, too late to be stopped—for if it were not already in the pipeline, I wonder if New Line Cinema would have reconsidered whether they were throwing good money after bad, $20 million of it—the genre (or whatever) almost made itself respectable with Mortal Kombat, the first video game adaptation to not be declared total shit. Its achievement is real, then: it managed to more-or-less recognizably adapt its source material's narrative with functionality and noticeable style, thereby satisfying its fans and leaving kritics with not so many targets of easy kriticism, while also making excellent money ($122 million on those $20 million) and avoiding kourting kontroversy.
Which is one reason I tend to konsider consider Mortal Kombat a failure, because it's fundamentally still a bad movie, and a bad movie that doesn't even do the thing it needed, to be a good Mortal Kombat adaptation, thanks to the quailing decision that this movie for adolescents had to come in with a PG-13, despite the seemingly undeniable fact that Mortal Kombat's appeal is inextricable from that fighting game's ludicrous indulgence in blood, gore, and implausible-unto-impossible fatal mortifications of the flesh. The filmmakers essentially invited the MPAA into their creative discussions—that isn't the framing they use, because that would be lame, but that's how it sounds—so that they could hew to the line of what the MPAA told them they'd allow, basically conceding their movie would be the sweaty SNES port of itself from the outset. And this, from the House That Freddy Built. I don't mean to overemphasize the gruesomeness's centrality—good martial arts movies don't need to rest their entire accomplishment on whether somebody, for instance, gets their heart ripped out (it's also not that germane, I guess, that Temple of Doom did have somebody's heart get ripped out, yet got a PG-13 re-rating; but so did Dumb and fucking Dumber)—but it's part-and-parcel to a movie that often feels surprisingly unviolent, which is even more burdersome when its source material is so infamous for being hyperviolent that it received the disapprobation of Congress. It opens up the prospect of a slightly harder-core Power Rangers, and I'm not certain that's not what happened.
"The fundamentally still a bad movie" part remains more important, though this, at least, is a nearer-run thing. You surely know the basic Mortal Kombat set-up, which is "it's Enter the Dragon," and the screenplay, courtesy Kevin Droney, tweaks that only slightly, even emphasizing the "expressly Enter the Dragon" aspects with his trio of globe-spanning good guy martial artists serving as standard-bearers for his plot, the one from China being the most important, on down to a hugely specific homage regarding the most dipshitty of the good guys being a diva who insists upon bringing the world's biggest pile of luggage with him for a two- or three-day sojourn to an evil island upon which is held an unconventional fighting tournament. (In fact, it jams on this joke even harder than Enter the Dragon, and in a movie never too far from its comic relief, the dipshittiest one trying to carry all this luggage up a mountain-sized flight of stairs is probably the single funniest gag it ever throws out.)
Now, Mortal Kombat might be Enter the Dragon, but it's with a very pronounced supernatural cast. So it is that our three protagonists have been chosen by Raiden the God of Thunder (Christopher Lambert), explicitly in the case of Liu Kang (Robin Shou), who was in fact raised to be Raiden's champion in the very Thaiest parts of China (I'm only funning the movie, regarding some choice location shooting at Wat Sa Phi Sanphet and Wat Chaiwatthanaram). More recently, Liu's rejected his "destiny" as mindless superstition, but after his younger brother (Steven Ho) dies in his stead at the hands of the master of the Mortal Kombat tournament, Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), Liu even meets Raiden himself, who bluntly informs him that all the stories were true, and if the Earthrealm loses this generation's tournament, then the primordial covenants that govern the universe shall permit the Emperor of the Outworld, the dread Shao Kahn, to invade Earth with all his inhuman armies, against which the human race would have no hope. Raiden's strategy is rather more opaque with the other two—American special operator Sonya Blade (Brigette Wilson), who's merely after the international sleazebag Kano (Trevor Goddard), and Hollywood action idol Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), who's seized upon Mortal Kombat as a way to finally prove he's a real martial artist—given that Raiden didn't actually choose either one, and only acts like he did, while both of them were, in fact, manipulated by Shang Tsung into joining Mortal Kombat for... some reason that I don't have in front of me, because it's not in the movie. But the upshot is that our heroes are confronted with Outworld's increasingly bizarre champions, like Sub-Zero (Francois Petit) and Scorpion (Chris Casamassa, but voiced by the game's own co-creator Ed Boon), and ultimately the many-limbed alien prince, Goro (Tom Woodruff Jr., sort-of, voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson), while at least one of Outworld's soldiers, in the form of Kitana (Talisa Soto), insinuates she's an ally, not that that matters too much when Shang Tsung is willing to bend and break whatever rules are necessary to destroy Raiden's heroes and secure victory for his emperor-god.
I threw some sarcastic stumbling into that plot synopsis, but I'll say this in Mortal Kombat's defense: rewatching it after all these years—especially with its truly wretched 2021 reboot never too far from my mind—has given me a newfound respect for the, apparently, extremely real difficulties of adapting Mortal Kombat to the screen, a task I've traditionally considered, in what I suppose was my own arrogance, to be such a trivial thing that I've always felt I could figure it out inside an afternoon. I still sort of feel that way—I mean, like I said, it's Enter the Dragon, hence to no small degree the screenplay for it already exists—and of course there are the more obvious challenges, such as choosing what kind of talking scenes are going to constitute the majority of the movie in-between the actual fights. The other obvious challenge involves taking on, by necessity because it's a fighting game franchise, an unusually large ensemble cast. But Mortal Kombat doesn't even have that large an large ensemble cast, and while Mortal Kombat II had already been released, as far as that game's new characters go, because many of them are Outworld freaks and we want to keep Goro special, they constrain themselves to Kitana, plus a sequel-goosing glimpse of Shao Kahn and a non-playable cameo from Jax (Gregory McKinney). Yet even to the extent the focus squarely rests upon the original game, the franchise's very poster-children, Sub-Zero and Scorpion, are crushed down inside a single line uttered by Tagawa seeking forgiveness from the fans for making the two fascinating palette-swapped archenemies into Shang Tsung's personality-free slaves.
And since I just provided an example why, let's note that having a smaller ensemble cast might not be any advantage, because while the fighting tournament movie requires cannon fodder, the fighting tournament video game is unlikely to provide such characters on purpose, the closest we get from Mortal Kombat being Kano, and only by default because no one ever tries a more interesting take on Kano. (Raiden, for his part, was a participant in the game, but a chessmaster in the movie, moving his pieces through a thematic arc that plays on the name "Mortal Kombat" to spin it as an opportunity for humans to exercise their own agency against the designs of gods, by virtue of overcoming their own foibles; it's sufficiently functional that I don't judge it "a problem.") But for cannon fodder, the movie comes perilously close to making Sub-Zero and Scorpion into that, while introducing definitionally-uncompelling original characters like Art (Kenneth Edwards) and some guy who might as well be Deejay from Super Street Fighter II in order to provide vanquishable foes for the good guys and demonstrative victims for bad guys, characters who'd never be "a problem" in a movie about a fighting tournament, but, in a movie adaptation of a video game about a fighting tournament, are, at a minimum eliciting the audience's dismissal, which isn't good for it as a dramatic construct.
Beyond that, and this is what startled me to realize it, is that a movie cannot operate on the same ropey logic that a fighting game like Mortal Kombat foundationally depends on: no one has ever asked seriously, and maybe never asked at all, "how did the cast survive to be in Mortal Kombat 2 when I killed them all in Mortal Kombat 1?"; that is, it's a fighting tournament where the normative conclusion of any match is death, and also where Liu Kang can't opt out of beating Sonya Blade at least half to death, but now it's a movie with a very clearly-delineated "good" faction and a creeping necessity to keep them alive and ambulatory, while also unable to contemplate the notion of them fighting each other. Enter the Dragon solved that problem by turning into a James Bond movie, but this evidently scrambled Droney's brain, so that the latter half of Mortal Kombat becomes instead a series of legalistic shenanigans put into motion that effectively preclude any "fighting tournament" from continuing, except in the most nominal way, to the extent that I'm not even sure under what parameters Liu and Kitana's fight ended. This is on top of what are pretty, I think, unforced errors, like the pointless subterfuges undertaken by Shang Tsung that focus for no apparent reason besides their sexual tinge upon Sonya that, with some actual laziness, wind up muddled into Raiden's machinations instead; or the strategic and understandable but nonetheless disappointing choice to nerf the heroes' own supernatural arts, in favor of regular kung fu against demigods; and, I'd offer, the flat-out wrong choice to put a creature like Goro so front-and-center, so early, forwarding him as an actual character who does things like "eat dinner" and "talk to Kano about their respective life philosophies," and not only because he should serve as a shock factor at the correct stage of play, but because the monster has been realized via an impressive but sometimes-questionable mechanical rig, with some equally-questionable design regarding the relative lengths of his upper and lower arms, and which—whatever else—does not benefit from us being able to get this accustomed to it.
The good news is some challenges are hurdled with more panache than others; I don't think anyone would accuse Mortal Kombat of having great acting, but the two headlining heroes are likeable presences, Shou giving a nice "basic chosen one" to the side of entirely basic, thanks to an agreeable sense of humor directed mostly against Johnny Cage (did I make it clear he's the "dipshittiest one"? of course Johnny is), while if Ashby doesn't quite deserve his top billing*, I think it'd be hard to begrudge him that too hard, especially when Johnny winds up, and I suspect this is half-accidental, with all the coolest and indeed all the most actually-dramatic parts even if the final battle belongs to Liu. (Wilson and Soto are kind of flatly bad, I'm afraid, mostly as a result of underwritten parts, locking Wilson particularly into playing Sonya—not unreasonably, but still—as little besides a resting bitchface exhibition.) Tagawa is often regarded as the standout, not unfairly, essaying great matinee malevolence and making a role that's often just shouting arcade soundbytes like "FINISH HIM!" seem natural; but my favorite is Lambert, given leave to render this delirious performance on behalf of a distractible and absurdly chummy god (there's one bozo moment that feels like it's not even supposed to be in the movie where he apologizes, to some random henchman, for his unseriousness). He's an actively incorrect "Raiden" (or, credits-wise, "Rayden," some lawyer's overreaction), but an awful lot of fun anyway.
And it's late to be mentioning it now, but I'm sorry that I can't appreciate Mortal Kombat more, because I think I'd like to be the kind of person who calls himself a Paul W.S. Anderson fan. He was a relatively untested filmmaker here in 1995—Paul Thomas hadn't stolen his name and he wasn't "W.S." yet, and to date he'd only made the Gen X petty crime movie Shopping, making this a huge break for him—but I don't think inexperience is borne out too much in Mortal Kombat, at least besides its shambling story. It actually tends to look pretty great, with the blatant caveats; I suppose it's best to say that it looks great inconsistently, capable of intermittently exceptional atmosphere on behalf of Shang Tsung's ghost ship and satanic island, a collection of wonderfully gloomy and forbidding matte paintings that are insisting on their matte paintingness in the waning days of that art, riddled like a rat's warren with insidious tunnels and dungeons. He's getting good work out of production designer Jonathan Carlson, and misty shafts-of-light horror-adventure cinematography out of DP John Leonetti that's sufficiently impressive to have placed him in the director's chair for Mortal Kombat's sequel (making it likely, then, that Leonetti actually wished he'd shot this one worse), meaning that it's almost a problem that the island is already so otherworldly that, artistically (and financially), they've got nowhere left to escalate to once we reach Outworld. Which isn't the worst problem, but Anderson's slipping on banana peels, cinematically-speaking, all over the place, sometimes tonally, sometimes egregiously misjudging his visuals as in the case of "Reptile," rendered as some kind of digital gremlin who's not even "bad CGI for 1995" but more akin to a CGI house's demo reel from ten years prior. Eventually, by arcane means he becomes the (stuntman-portrayed**) antagonist of the film's most superfluous fight, and that itself is bothersome, because you could straight-facedly claim the film's most superfluous fight has had the most stuntwork "oomph" put into it.
So while it's less of one than I'd prefer, the movie exists to deliver these fantasy special effects kung fu sequences, and it does so. The very obvious best, to my mind, is Johnny's "is this even part of the tournament?" duel with Scorpion, that begins in a martial arts movie forest (that doesn't interact very well with the other-big-CGI-overreach of Scorpion's living harpoon) but makes its way to Literally Hell, I Guess, a low-rez-but-still-cool vision of the inferno that's all music video scaffolds and ladders, and thanks to Scorpion's demonic inhumanity involves the content in this Mortal Kombat movie I'm most comfortable calling "gore"; the second-best—at least as a narrative and character beat—likewise belongs to Johnny, in the bravado of his sunglasses-clad challenge to the unbeatable Goro and the "now that's adaptation" tactics he uses to get the upper hand on the Shokan warrior anyhow. Sonya's aperitif of a scuffle with Kano likewise righteously invokes game iconography, and it's got surprise on its side; the struggle with Sub-Zero, intended as a cleverness, feels stupid, like the cryomancer is waiting for Liu to very slowly remember his super-secret weakness whilst he builds up his snowball; Liu's battle with Shang Tsung doesn't send us off on the highest note, either, the mano-a-mano phase of it interrupted for a desultory struggle concerning the enthralled souls of fallen warriors that doesn't do that much except steal badly from one of the most special New Lines past, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4, but it solidifies a workable arc for Liu, if nothing else.
The coda (koda?) is horseshit, but action film-wise we've gotten more-or-less what we asked for, and Anderson has ensured an inordinate amount of energy gets infused into these action scenes, like POV shots during flips and all manner of gonzo flourishes of similar nature, that isn't all that serious or severe, but obtains the carnivalesque silliness that a Mortal Kombat should have in some way or another, and if it isn't going to do it with blood and ruptured bodies Anderson has figured out the next-best option, as has a soundtrack headlined by one of the legendary movie songs about the movie you're watching, "Techno Syndrome," aka "MOOOORTAL KOMMMMMBAT DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN." The movie's not good, but neither is it a hard sit, which might not be true of literally any other movie called "Mortal Kombat."
Score: 5/10
*They came close to getting Jean-Claude Van Damme, who begged off for Street Fighter, and while the martial arts starpower this would've occasioned is tantalizing, I resist the temptation to wonder "what if"; there's something so quintessentially all-American about our beloved parody of ourselves, Johnny Cage—indeed, moreso than Guile required—that I'm glad Ashby's effortless smarm was tapped instead.
**Portrayed ultimately by a bag full of bugs from the bait store. You know, Reptile.
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