Mortal Kombat (2021) Review
This weekend, the third live action Mortal Kombat movie drops in theaters as well on HBO Max. Earlier this morning, I watched it, so here is my review for the movie. As a point of reference, I didn’t grow up playing the video games or watching the ‘90s movies. The only thing I know about is they fight each other, and a few character names. Beyond that, I went in pretty fresh. Here’s my review!
The Good:
You go into this movie wanting some fun action, and this movie delivers that. There is plenty of great action sprinkled through-out the movie. It starts very early on and it doesn’t let up until the credits role. My favorite would be a fight between Scropion and Sub-Zero in the finale of the movie, and a cool fight between the two of them in the opening scene. But everybody gets a moment in the spotlight to shine. But with the action it’s Rated-R action, when a guy gets stabbed blood goes everyone. I should say, this is hard R movie and the action is main reason for that.
For the most part, I liked the characters in the movie. The stand-out being Kano who gets a bunch of really funny moments. He’s easily the funniest character in the movie for me. It was interesting to see Mechad Brooks in this movie as Jax, because I’m so use to seeing him as Jimmy Olsen on Supergirl. But I thought he did a good job. And the main guy, Lewis Tan as Cole Young was also very good. I hadn’t seen him in anything else, but I liked what he brought to this movie.
Also, the soundtrack for this movie is pretty good. They took the 90s Mortal Kombat theme and 21st centuryified it, which worked for the movie. And it made certain scenes better when it played.
Finally, this movie sets up a sequel pretty well with where it ends. I’m not sure if they will get a sequel, it’ll depend on how well this movie does. But, I’d be somewhat interested in a sequel for this movie.
The Bad:
For me, the scenes that weren’t on Earth looked fake to me. The Outworld looked really weird anytime they would cut to that. And it looks they took real people and put them in cut scenes from a Mortal Kombat video game. Also, the design for characters like Raiden, didn’t look good. It look overly processed and way yo CGI.
Also, I think the run time for the movie is a big problem. It’s 1 hour and 50 minutes, but it seemed liked the crammed a 2+ hour long story into under 2 hours. The movie is just flying from plot point to plot point without any breathing room. So I wish they added 10-15 minutes to make the movie flow a little bit better.
The movie also tries to add in some touches of humor here and there, but most of them fall flat. The big example of this is a scene in the finale. You have a character brutally kill another character then he says “flawless victory”, and I’m guessing this was a line from the video games. And it just doesn’t work in this movie, the humor worked better when it flowed organically.
I said earlier but I know hardly know nothing about Mortal Kombat. But this movie assumes that you do, it assumes that you know these character and this world. Since I don’t, it was confusing at points in time because the movie didn’t explain enough who characters were. I wish they did that, so people like me could follow the movie better.
Finally, some of the CGI here is really really bad. There’s a 4-armed monster fight towards the end of the movie, and the monster looks really fake. It doesn’t look believable and it looks like a character from a 90’s videogame. And I like said earlier, that’s what most of the movie looks like.
Final Thoughts: In general, this was a pretty mediocre movie. It had some cool action, some character I enjoyed, and a good soundtrack. But the way the movie looks, the humor, and the assumptions that everybody who watches this movie knows what is going on holds the movie back.
The Score: 6.7/10 (C+)
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