Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat's problem is it keeps proposing situations and scenarios that are far more exciting than anything the film actually ends up being about. Initially it appears the filmmakers have twigged that, for a video game series suffering under mountains of contradictory lore, the franchise's most gripping tension is the one between the two colour-coded ninjas positioned at either ends of the first game's character select screen. Simon McQuoid's film, screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham, begins in the midst of feudal artifice, with Joe Taslim's Chinese Sub Zero leading an army of expendable goons to the sliding door of his Japanese rival, Hiroyuki Sanada's Scorpion. Whatever the root of their conflict, the two assassins cannot communicate; the pair exchange growls in incompatible mother tongues before cutting each other down. 

Although affected in terms of location - a picturesque minka, complete with nearby stream - this prologue is by far the most assured segment in terms of storytelling and action choreography. Taslim and Sanada's mutual loathing is palpable and, once we've been battered over the head by the tragic symbolism of Scorpion's trademark spear tip, the swirling violence that issues from this twilight Samurai often tracks movement from the first twitch of an arm to the clattering, bloody, result. Expectation raised into the heavens, the film comes crashing down with the introduction of Lewis Tan's Cole Young, an MMA tomato, bumming around modern day gyms and marked for death by multi-dimensional wizardry. Taslim reappears in this section as a spectral blizzard, indiscriminately lashing innocent bystanders with a torrent of brick sized hail in pursuit of a Tan's cross-generational loose end. Hand-to-hand kombat is briefly subordinated by weaving trucks and KelTec shotguns, suggesting a prolonged, supernatural, chase.

Sadly, Mortal Kombat isn't interested in hurtling momentum; neither is the film content to build itself around a tightknit family besieged by weather warping button men. Taslim's mighty presence is tidied far away from a scholastic special in which a team of attractive martial artists slowly learn to channel their cosmic energies for a tournament that never actually comes. Mortal Kombat's middle section is massive and yawning, a lumpen mega-act straining to solve a deeply unnecessary storytelling decision that demands that each of our fantasy fighter heroes begin this would-be series as rookies, unable to summon up any of the game's countless special moves. Cole's path to power, training alongside Ludi Lin's Liu Kang, Mehcad Brooks' Jax, Max Huang's Kung Lao and Jessica McNamee's Sonya, is nothing like the computer assisted chanbara that opens the film either, their scuffles often resolving to a weakly animated collage that completely loses track of Kombatants and pales in comparison to the FX studios' blubbery, Body Worlds, fatalities.