MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION
1997
Directed by John R. Leonetti
Written by Lawrence Kasanoff, Joshua Wexler, John Tobias, Brent Friedman, and Bryan Zabel (based on the video game Mortal Kombat 3 by Ed Boon and John Tobias)
As we discussed, 1995's Mortal Kombat was that rarest of things in its day: the video game adaptation that people basically liked, and on the back of being basically liked, it earned a very respectable profit for its distributor, New Line Cinema, as well as its principal producer, Lawrence Kasanoff; there was absolutely no reason not to do a sequel, and indeed the prospect must have seemed a welcome one, with plenty more extant source material from a fighting game franchise that actually did, more-or-less, have a legitimate story to tell (compare and contrast, for example, the slightly hilarious stasis embraced by its only true peer competitor for the hearts and minds of arcade-goers, which at the time of Mortal Kombat's film adaptation's release had only just managed to move past its perpetual reiterations of Street Fighter II). It wasn't ideal, of course that, in its idiotic zeal to pin a sequel hook to itself, Mortal Kombat had somewhat precluded an adaptation of Mortal Kombat II, and accordingly I think anybody would have been obliged to forgive the (many) writers of Mortal Kombat's sequel, if it had demurred, and said that when Shao Kahn appeared in the Earthrealm's sky it was simply to threaten and bluster at our heroes, who'd just won the Mortal Kombat tournament and thus derailed his plans to invade Earth for another ten generations. But, as the odd and unlikeable title Mortal Kombat: Annihilation might well suggest, the sequel did not demur, and decided to jump directly ahead to Mortal Kombat 3, implying, I suppose, that the fifteen minutes that Mortal Kombat had spent in Outworld was our adaptation of Mortal Kombat II. I find this a bummer: even Wikipedia isn't helpful about explaining how another Mortal Kombat tournament happened again so soon (though it could be explained easily-enough: I imagine it had something to do with Raiden accepting the calculated risk of a tournament to end the tournaments forever), but Mortal Kombat II is the series at maybe its most creative as a pure work of art, with its superbly surreal vision of a hyperviolent fighting tourmament held not on Earth but in Shao Kahn's native magical nightmarescape (the living forest alone, you know?), and it's something that would seem to have been imminently adaptable to film by folks who—even if I, personally, don't much like the film, Mortal Kombat—had just managed to make a satisfactory adaptation of a fighting tournament game that had had less stuff to actually adapt.
But this was not, evidently, Kasanoff's line of thinking, while for another thing this mostly isn't those folks anyway, with Paul W.S. Anderson, in what would turn out to be a prescient move, declining to direct the sequel in favor of pursuing Soldier, which took a while to develop, so in the meantime the Anderson movie that likely even shared some multiplexes in the fall of 1997 with Annihilation was his extraordinary space horror flick, Event Horizon. More remarkably, basically not one of the department heads from the first film came back for the sequel—well, not in the same role—with the sole exceptions being composer George Clinton (not that George Clinton) and, if we count him, second unit director and fight choreographer Pat E. Johnson, who nonetheless seems to have had his purview diminished (he's "additional" fights in Annihilation), as Robin Shou, who'd choreographed some action on behalf of Liu Kang, has now, going by the credits, taken on wider responsibilities this time around*; and this is worrisome, because to the extent Mortal Kombat is "good" a lot of that was down to its craftspeople, and the closest to continuity otherwise would be cinematographer Matthew Leonetti who sounds familiar because he was brother to the first film's cinematographer Robert Leonetti—while for Robert, this was his grand opportunity, promoted to direct Annihilation as his very first film, the sequel to the one he'd photographed two years prior. So, without getting too far ahead of ourselves, this presumably did every other cinematographer who's ever nursed a desire to direct quite the disservice, though it created for Leonetti one of the most unkillable directorial careers in Hollywood as a purveyor of movies basically everyone despises. Similar things could be said about Kasanoff himself, once an associate of no less a figure than James Cameron—goodness, he co-founded Lightstorm, something Cameron seems to be so proud of I can't immediately determine when or if Kasanoff became separated from that company, though his last credit is Strange Days—but he's much better-known as the Mortal Kombat film and television (and live stage show!) franchises' stumbling impresario, a position he sought to secure for himself when the original Mortal Kombat game overtook the light gun shooter adaptation of Terminator 2 as the no. 1 arcade game. Meanwhile, in the long span between Mortal Kombat movies he moved into animation, bringing forth such films as Foodfight!, one of the famously terrible films, and Bobbleheads, serving as that concealed place where Disney Renaissance legend Kirk Wise went when it was time for him to die.
It's all, like I said, quite worrisome, and yes indeed: whatever attempt at mystery I might've been up to, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is of course also one of the famously terrible films, and the nicest thing I'd like to say upfront is "I've seen worse ones." There will, anyway, prove to be a very short span of time in between the appearance of the New Line logo at minute zero and the point that it becomes obvious that it's going to be a terrible film, basically just the brief little title sequence's reprise of "Techno Syndrome," which leads into a clipshow recap of the last film that's making a noticeable effort to include only Shou's Liu Kang, Talisa Soto's Kitana, and characters who died, over which Raiden—James Remar, because there's a reason they're being cagey with the stock footage, and a substantial fraction of the first film's cast also deigned not to return, because I guess it was just known that this would be a debacle—attempts to get us up to speed on the whole Mortal Kombat thing. And Remar's not actively atrocious in this voiceover or throughout—there is a very strong, maybe even undeniable argument that he's giving Annihilation its best performance and by miles and miles—though we still might find his attempts to evoke even the same measure of screen presence as a Christopher Lambert to be a little pitiful, especially once he gets a haircut and/or his white guy East Asian god wig gets removed, thereby somehow making him look sillier. Yet, for the moment, this screenplay (credited to Brent Friedman and Bryan Zabel, interpreting a "story" by a team that included Kasanoff himself and, to his later-acknowledged eternal shame, none other than MK co-creator John Tobias) has already brought us, within the first two minutes of movie, its very first (of many) inapt, awful, and essentially-undeliverable lines: "Our chosen ones were returned to Liu Kang's home on Earth, only to enjoy a brief period of peace... for someone from Outworld has a different point of view." And my voice broke like Mark Hamill's when I heard it, frankly. "A different point of view?"
That's just one lousy line, so whatever (the really abrading stuff only arrives later alongside Lynn Williams's Jax, this film's interpretation of that character being more actually racist, I'd hazard, than merely the cavalier casting of its otherdimensional beings, even if those otherdimensional beings are named "Raiden" and "Shao Kahn"); but the sensation of things giving way completely is pretty much entirely confirmed as Shao Kahn (Brian Thompson) begins his assault upon Earthrealm, already getting the next lousy line by invoking the Bible for some reason ("The Earth was created in six days, so too shall it be destroyed, and on the seventh day, mankind will rest... in peace!" and I guess I affirmatively wish it was at least "in pieces!" if we're going to be moronic), in a franchise whose cosmology is so completely divorced from Judeo-Christian concepts that putting them into the mouth of one of its concepts has kind of already ruined that concept. Then the kicker, whereupon reality more-or-less dissolves and all we have left is Annihilation: now comes the very first broadside of this film's visual effects, with composited ninjas flipping across a still-moving frame in a way that seems to want you to notice how their layer is being dragged across the background, and what backgrounds they are, digital composites that leave extras in the foreground unignorably pixelated, computer-assisted skies that have been rendered in such a way that the file's very border is visibly splitting a pair of copy-and-pasted mpegs in two, and my favorite aspect of the film's VFX (especially because this isn't just a one-time thing in the opening), the fact that you can often actually see the scanlines of the VHS they were using to edit these VFX prior to their compositing, something possibly even more ingloriously apparent in its current 4K streaming version. It is all an ugly fever dream of a badly-translated tokusatsu show that you convince yourself you must have imagined, despite all the evidence that this is not only real, but an American movie that cost $30 million; and the plot shall catch up to that imagery soon.
That plot, in briefest terms, concerns Shao Kahn's scheme to kidnap Kitana with the assistance of her evidently resurrected and enthralled mother Sindel (Musetta Vander), not that this shall ever be quite explained (I believe the exact phrase is "whatever she was," and wow); and it's fair to say that Vander is possibly the only actor threatening to eclipse Ramer, because she genuinely understood and embraced the full-on Rita Repulsa-ness of her assignment ("Mother! You're alive!" "Too bad you... will die!"), not that this is, you know, "good" or even especially entertaining, and she can't twirl in a circle very fast (that'll turn out to be important).
Sorry, I was attempting to summarize the plot of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation: so, Kitana initially escapes thanks to New Johnny Cage (Chris Conrad) sacrificing himself to save her, and Raiden sends his remaining champions off on various subplots: Liu and Kitana to find Apache mystic Nightwolf (Litefoot) who will help prepare them for the rigors of immortal kombat; Sonya (now Sandra Hess, all 95 pounds of her, which is slightly distracting even in the context of a 90s action movie) is sent to reunite with Jax; Raiden, curiously, goes to pray, which sort of makes sense by the end but not in the moment; and I would be remiss not to mention that their mode of conveyance to their far-flung destinations is, like, a giant subterranean hamster ball. But Kitana doesn't go another ten minutes without getting captured after all, and Shao Kahn has already begun the spell that will merge Outworld and Earth together, giving him absolute power over both realms. Or, you know, achieve his real goal, which is to make his daddy (Reiner Schone) love him.
See, right up till that point (and I suppose "giant subterranean hamster balls" notwithstanding), this is basically functional as an adaptation of Mortal Kombat 3, which is about how Shao Kahn broke the cosmic rules, somehow, and merged Earth and Outworld (though amongst the film's most grievous failures is how unbelievably uncool this very cool thing from the video game is here, so instead of a post-apocalyptic Earth transformed into a demented soul farm, it's just some badly-VFXed landmarks floating around the sky in Outworld); it also taps into Kitana's plot, which I went most of my life misunderstanding as something closer to this movie than it apparently is in the games (I pretty much thought Sindel was Shao Kahn's babe, and Kitana was his rebellious stepdaughter, and I frankly think this is better). It's not going to take Kitana's plot any further regardless of what that plot is; she's going to spend the rest of the movie dangling in a cage.
But this... indignity which it inflicts upon Shao Kahn, the iconic bad guy of this series, that is truly inexplicable. I don't believe Shao Kahn would ever have survived the realities of Thompson's performance: he's not big enough, he's not photographed imposingly enough, he's in the movie too much, he talks way, way too much (it feels like with a wiser script you could have honestly gotten away with just casting Brian Glynn and Steve Ritchie's voice!), and he was apparently allergic to staying in full costume, so we get the deflating spectacle of an interdimensional war deity rendered fully as the third-largest dude from your local gym. But these are explicable problems; it literally cannot be explained how a bunch of writers convinced themselves that the best thing for their archvillain would be to constantly overshadow him by a disapproving father, not even as a background motivation, he's standing right there, insulting and belitting a Shao Kahn who whines in return, the entire time. Inexplicable characterization is a constant companion in Annihilation, though, like a Nightwolf who, perhaps in response to criticism of his ethnic stereotype (in a fighting game, you say?), talks like any Gen Xer off the street, up to and including quoting Star Wars (seemingly autonomically, but correctly!) at Liu Kang; or Jax, who spends most of the movie complaining and asking what the eradication of all life on Earth has to do with him, while Sonya pleads for his help, thus establishing that the emotional arc she completes by the end of the movie is to learn to admit when she needs... help.
Till that last bit, I'd probably been giving a horribly incorrect picture of Annihilation as, at least, a coherently bad movie, and nothing, nothing, could be further from the truth. This is a video game movie that actually does come close to video game logic, in the most pejorative sense, action scenes and cutscenes weaving in and out, important characters appearing only to vanish almost immediately, most astoundingly when the (actually) new Sub-Zero (Keith Cooke) intercedes to save Liu and Kitana from the cyborg (the cyborg? from magical Outworld?) Smoke, declaring his backstory, declaiming the vital importance of their mission, and once he's battled an even more incomprehensibly-present Scorpion (J.J. Perry), he pulls a Batman on Liu while the latter's back is turned, perhaps to enact his own plans, but have fun imagining those plans for yourself because once the fan-service has been concluded so has his participation in this movie, doing little more than prefiguring the 2021 reboot, inasmuch as I might pick Sub-Zero and Scorpion's battle as this movie's best-choreographed and most pointless fight scene.
Is it at least a good fantasy martial arts actioner with Mortal Kombat kharacteristics, then? Not really, and it's not often trying to be, and I think the biggest frown the movie ever gave me was when I realized that Kitana's briefly-seen deadly fans were never coming back, whereas you could undoubtedly immediately think of better ways of staging Smoke, for a movie, than this cinematographer-turned-director did. The second-best fight scene might actually be Raiden's humiliating modern dance with a ninja wherein they synchronize their roundhouse kicks—Annihilation does benefit from its boisterous techno soundtrack—though I'm partial to Sonya and Jax's bout with Cyrax (also Perry), mostly because I actually like the very game-accurate plastic-shelled cyborgs even if these movies do abysmally by the Lin Kuei thread of the lore. The movie is maybe at its best when it is overcooked Mortal Kombat-by-way-of-Power Rangers (albeit still a bloodlessly PG-13 version of that), though the decidedly off-brand realization of Motaro (Deron McBee) and Sheeva (Marjean Holden) certainly militate against this proposition, as does an equally off-brand Mileena (Dana Hee) and her battle with Sonya that's essentially a creature of editing. But the last twenty minutes has abandoned even "fantasy martial arts," in favor of a CGI Ray Harryhausen riff, of all the insane things, of which all we can say is "well, I guess this movie's computer graphics are still probably better than the forthcoming Mortal Kombat 4's"; this is the result of Nightwolf's sole plot function, which was to introduce the concept of the "animality," a goof gimmick finishing move, unaccountably now made a key structural component of this film's narrative. This is unless Nightwolf also served "the function" of prompting the scene where the duplicitous Jade (Irina Pantaeva) meets Liu Kang, though her function is mostly "Pantaeva is absurdly beautiful, and the makeup artists have decided she should get not one but two hot looks, with her eyebrows and bangs shapeshifting between 'good' and 'evil' forms," this being permitted for no reason besides I guess somebody decided that was funny.
Which brings us to trying to tie up Mortal Kombat: Annihilation into a neat little bow, and I cannot. I'll say I almost prefer it to the 2021 film just for being so vigorously bad (it's at least not boring, so remind me to kick the 2021 film down a point), but there's no escaping the conclusion that it is extremely bad, however you slice it. But it also feels practically beyond "incompetence." It had its birthing pains—first-time director, many reshoots, and the VFX seem to some degree be what happened when the production legitimately started running out of money—but it damned near feels like it could not have come into existence like this except as the result of making a bad movie on purpose, and given that Kasanoff and Leonetti didn't slink off into exile after this but forged right on ahead making movies that I understand to be much like it, it's maybe not that distinguishable from "intentional."
Score: 3/10
*Whereas, as it happens, by far the most famous name associated with Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, wouldn't make it into the credits, that being Tonya Jaa serving as a stunt double that Shou deployed to stand in for himself.
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