“Mortal Kombat 2” corrects the mistakes of the first

The year is 2021, and we have barely come out of the COVID lockdown. Warner Brothers decided to release all its movies on HBO Max and in theaters. One of those was a reboot of “Mortal Kombat.” The movie has some good moments, but is overall bad. They chose not to make one of the preexisting characters the main character, opting to create an original character (Cole Young, played by Lewis Tran) and surround him with characters from the game. The most baffling choice was to not even do the Mortal Kombat Tournament in the movie, to paraphrase Ian Malcolm from “Jurassic Park,” “There will be Mortal Kombat in this Mortal Kombat movie?” Five years later, we have a sequel that looks to correct the mistakes of the 2021 movie.

Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) and the champions of Earthrealm face off against the champions of Outworld in an effort to keep Shao Kahn(Martyn Ford) from taking over Earth.

First and foremost, we get the tournament. The whole point of the games is that your character is fighting in a tournament. It was crazy that the first movie didn’t have an actual tournament. It spent so much time with the characters training and awakening their “acrana” (basically, their superpowers). That led to some great fight sequences, but the rest of the movie was boring. This movie does the opposite: it opens with the final fight of the ninth tournament, Shao Kahn and Outworld win (you have to win ten in a row to take over a realm). This meant that the fights had weight-if you lose, you die (it’s not called MORTAL Kombat for nothing).

When this was first announced, one notable bit of news was the casting of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage, a fan favorite from the game. The trailers prominently featured Cage, suggesting he would be the main character. But he wasn’t. He is in the movie and has a prominent role, but I would not classify “Mortal Kombat 2” as his story. The true main character of this movie is Kitana (Adeline Rudolph). Her father is killed in the opening by Shao Kahn, and she is forced to become his “daughter.” She might be fighting for Outworld, but she secretly is helping Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and the champions of Earthrealm. Normally, I would be annoyed that the trailer promised one thing and the movie delivered something else, but I applaud the choice. I am a huge Karl Urban fan, and he was a big reason I wanted to see this in the first place. I was very impressed by Rudolph’s performance and Kitana’s arc in the movie.

The movie was a ton of fun, and that is all it needed to be. It’s not going to be on my top 10 of the year, but I had a great time in the theater. I don’t believe every movie needs to be a 10-out-of-10 masterpiece. Sometimes I just want to go to the theater and not contemplate life’s great questions. Sometimes I just want to watch some cool fight scenes.

6/10

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore and language

1h 56m