Mortal Kombat II marks the continuation of the 2021 reboot, which was, itself, based on the franchise’s own 90s flicks, which failed to really whip up a film series from its source material: the classic arcade fighting game.
The revival seemed set on a similar course to its predecessors – it was flashy and bloody, but not a huge success with the series’ core fanbase, not least due to its limited cast that seemed to be missing some of the all-time fan favourite playable characters from the games themselves.
The decision to centre the 2021 film around MMA fighter Cole Young – a new protagonist created for the film – rather than a pre-existing hero sparked debate too. Mortal Kombat has been a fighting game mainstay for decades, now, and fans may well have grown up playing as a handful of cherished characters, so director Simon McQuoid and his team have had their work cut out for them when it comes to picking out the cream of the crop to star in these film adaptations.
‘Our fates would not be settled by the size of our armies. They would be decided in Kombat’
This second instalment seems to have gone out of its way to try and address those two key qualms from the reboot, with new characters stepping into the limelight and old dog Cole taking the backseat, now part of the film’s supporting cast. We last saw him setting off for Hollywood to recruit past-his-prime B-movie martial artist Johnny Cage, who felt like the most egregious exclusion in the previous film, and this has been billed as Johnny’s movie through and through, with Lord of the Rings and The Boys star Karl Urban breathing some life into the character. He’s more than a little jaded – slumming it out in fan conventions, a relative nobody in the modern age of movies – but he’s quick with a quip and he seems to keep his classic shades in an easily accessible holster, sticking them on whenever it’s showtime.
The trailers seemed incredibly eager to champion Johnny as the true star of this sequel, but the finished film plays as much more of a two-hander. Urban shares the spotlight with Adeline Rudolph’s Kitana, another fan favourite, as she, too, makes her long-awaited return to the arena. It’s really her story more than anyone else’s, with parallels drawn thematically and structurally between her plight and what we saw from Cole in 2021. Rudolph is a quality addition to the cast, playing her role well as a greyer character torn between the warring factions of Earthrealm and Outworld.
The reboot wasn’t a great film by any means – its fights were its best feature, packed with the hyper-violent, bloody hits that fans of the game are looking for – but it did have a basic sense of the hero’s journey to fall back on. Cole Young might not have been pulled from the games themselves but as someone with little stake in the Mortal Kombat franchise, I managed to find enough to like about his story to carry me through. Here, the focus is arguably split between Cage and Kitana as dual protagonists, but more than ever, the film has pushed everything else to the sidelines in favour of championing the core fights and match-ups between characters.
The result feels akin to just watching somebody play the games on YouTube, with just about everything in-between feeling like interludes killing time before the next set piece. There’s a clear love for the source material in the film’s DNA – each set is faithfully recreated and I’m sure (not unlike a Billie Eilish fan coming out to watch Hit Me Hard and Soft) the real devotees will watch these set-pieces with glee. I do think the uninitiated will struggle to see the appeal, though – I’ve played a little of the games, but without that decades-long reverence for this world and its characters, I really didn’t find much to tangibly hold onto here among the many moments of bloody, squishy yet ultimately weightless violence.
The new inclusion of a pale-faced necromancer reminiscent of Star Wars’ Grand Inquisitor or the Ginosaji hinders the proceedings of the film’s long-awaited tournament, too, as characters seem to verge on immortality. Call me a stickler for the rules, but that really had me (like ABBA before me) questioning the very Name of the Game…
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong bloody violence, infrequent very strong language.
Mortal Kombat II is in kinemas now.
