Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat is a martial arts action adventure movie. The film is Warner Bros. Pictures attempt at rebooting the 1990s franchise based off of the video game of the same name. It follows Cole Young, a mixed martial artist who is past his prime. When he is recruited to fight with Earth's greatest champions, in order to save the world from Shang Tsung’s Outworld villains, he must find his inner “arcana” before it is too late.

I thought that the plot was fun, action packed from the beginning with very bloody and creative fight choreography. The script however was not that great. It was filled with corny, cheap one liners, mostly coming from the character Kano played by Josh Lawson. I could tell he was tasked with bringing the comedy to the movie but after a while I was over it. It just seemed like there wasn’t a lot of effort put into the writing.

The worst part of this movie for me was the acting and character development. Since this is a remake I compared a lot of the actors to the ones of the 1995 film. For me there were a couple who stood out like sour thumbs who did not compare to the originals. Ludi Lin who played Liu Kang could not hold the star power that Robin Shou possessed in the original. As for Sonya Blade, she was my favorite character to play in the video game, so when Bridgette Wilson took the role in the 90s I was a huge fan of it. Jessica McNamee did a decent job as Sonya Blade but is no Bridgette Wilson. There were a couple of characters that I was okay with like Hiroyuki Sanada’s character Hanzo Hasashi. Sanada brought something very interesting to this role, I connected with his character and I would have liked to have seen more of  his character, as I am a fan of Sanada’s work in other television shows and movies. The role of Cole Young played by Lewis Tan wasn’t in the original franchise so I was fine with him. He did a decent job carrying this film. His costume was a bit lame though. In regard to the rest of the cast, I had no idea who most of the characters were. The writer didn’t do a very good job at introducing them and also didn’t provide an origin story for the majority of main cast, so I just couldn’t really connect to many of them.

This movie was definitely geared toward die hard Mortal Kombat fans. Even though I was a fan of the fight sequences it couldn’t compare to the original film for me. I can tell they are planning for a sequel so I am hoping with the next one that they dig deeper into the characters and give the fans more to connect to.