Mortal Kombat II: Press Start to Regret
Sunday afternoon. The Blue Jays are beating the Tigers and somehow I’m not watching that. Instead, I’m in a movie theatre as the credits roll on Mortal Kombat II, the iconic theme music blasting like it’s trying to personally revive the 90s. The weirdest part? I’m smiling. Not because the movie was good. I’m smiling the way you smile after surviving a minor electrical fire. Confused, relieved and definitely a little dumber.
Flash back two days. I’m asking a friend if he’s seen anything new and he says, “Mortal Kombat II was okay.” I say, “Really? The trailer looked rough.” Then he hits me with the most dangerous sentence in modern cinema: “It’s actually better than the trailer.” Sold. I didn’t just buy a ticket. I bought an IMAX ticket, because apparently “better than the trailer” is all it takes for me to upgrade a bad decision. I remembered the original 1995 Mortal Kombat. Pete Sampras’ wife, techno music and rubbery effects which still haunt the video-game-movie era like a cursed power-up. What I did not realize was that this wasn’t a sequel to the 90s movie. It was a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat, a film I had completely forgotten existed, which, in hindsight, may have been my brain protecting me.
To be fair, the movie has one good thing, Johnny Cage. His introduction is fun. He’s at a Comic-Con-style booth promoting old action films, radiating pure 90s VHS-bin vibe. Karl Urban plays him with a clenched Clint Eastwood growl and the energy of a man who has definitely signed headshots at a mall in 1998. For about ten minutes I thought…this could work. Then the movie kept going.
Mortal Kombat II doesn’t unfold so much as stagger forward. Characters appear. Realms are mentioned. Portals open. The dialogue sounds like it was assembled from rejected superhero speeches and fridge magnets. At one point, Kitana gives an “I renounce…” speech and I nearly whispered, “Wonder Woman already returned that in WW84.” The action is cheap. Not charming-cheap. Not cult-classic cheap. Just cheap-cheap. The sets look like they were filmed in front of the medieval castle at Canada’s Wonderland. I kept expecting a teenager in a Wonderland polo shirt to wander through and say, “Just so you know, Splash Works closes at six.” I was happy to see Lewis Tan, Mehcad Brooks and Hiroyuki Sanada, but their scenes felt chopped up and weightless. Especially Sanada, who appears to have been rendered through fog, lightning and obligation.
The most interesting part of the experience wasn’t on screen. It was two guys in the audience. These men were reacting like they were witnessing the Sistine Chapel of uppercuts. Every bad line was Shakespearean. Every flying kick landed. I respect joy wherever people can find it but I couldn’t find the source. This movie is dumb. Dumb with reclining seats and a surcharge. I walked out feeling like the movie had performed a fatality on my attention span. My brain wasn’t damaged exactly but it did leave the theatre buffering
It’s May, when Hollywood is supposed to remind us why theaters still matter. Instead, I keep watching cinematic landfill with assigned seating. Maybe that’s why I was smiling during the credits. By the time the theme music hit, I had accepted the absurdity. Somewhere in the real world the Blue Jays were beating the Tigers. In my world, I had paid extra to watch cinema lose a round to itself. That’s not entertainment. That’s a cry for help with popcorn.
Mortal Kombat II is bad dialogue, discount castle lighting and one brutal realization: sometimes the trailer isn’t the warning. Sometimes it’s the mercy.