Mortal Kombat II

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. 

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.