Presumably indicative of the creaking audience the film expects to attract, director Simon McQuoid's second pass at adapting Midway's ancient arcade series proposes itself as The NeverEnding Story for the washed-up, straight-to-video action stars of the 1990s. Karl Urban is recruited to play Johnny Cage, a character originally designed as something of a stand-in for Jean-Claude Van Damme when game designers Ed Boon and John Tobias were working on their coin-op calling card. Here, Cage is middle-aged and unsuccessfully working the convention circuit before he is enlisted by an inter-dimensional God to fight on behalf of Earth. Although apparently poised to build itself entirely around Urban, whose star has ascended thanks to Amazon's The Boys television series, Mortal Kombat II never fully commits to this handover, preferring to - and this is to the film's credit - maintain an interest in Ludi Lin's Liu Kang, Hiroyuki Sanada's Scorpion and, introduced in this instalment, Adeline Rudolph's Princess Kitana (Tadanobu Asano's Raiden is sadly sidelined, with Pink Floyd's laser show leaking out of his freshly cleaved throat). Initially off-puttingly by-the-numbers, Mortal Kombat II successfully pivots away from the hand-holding character development of the previous Mortal Kombat to concentrate on bloody battles staged inside computer-generated infernos. Following a stand out confrontation between Liu Kang and Max Huang's zombie Kung Lao - which takes place on a churning portal stage quoted directly from Sega's 16-bit adaptation of the Mortal Kombat II cabinet - McQuoid's film weaves several interconnected, and task complimentary, climaxes together. These cross-cut incursions simultaneously allow for your standard universe saving amulets as well as a feature opportunity for a vengeful daughter to slowly mutilate and dissect the faceless monster that murdered her father.
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