Review of Mortal Kombat (2021) by Letoatreides82 — 25 Apr 2021

Started out great with the nice Japanese setting and suspenseful atmosphere but then it went downhill from there. The movie introduces a brand new character, Cole Young, as the main character of the movie, big mistake.

The Mortal Kombat franchise has plenty of awesome characters they could have used but instead they decided to make up a brand new one who is mostly mute throughout the entire movie and when he does talk it's just generic gibberish.

I thought Kano was decent and he mostly carried this movie, it's too bad he's dead now. The Scorpion vs Sub-Zero fight scenes were cool but short. Kung Lao does a cool fatality and dies too soon. Liu Kang does his dragon fatality but makes you wonder why he doesn't just stay in dragon form.

Jax does a cool fatality but at the wrong setting, he should have instead uppercutted Reiko into the bottom of the pit like in the first game. The movie tries to explain how these earthrealm fighters got their super powers by coming up with this idea of arcana, that these people chosen by a dragon tatoo can unlock their powers by having something happen to them.

Apparently the tatoo can be passed on to the victor if the victor kills someone with a dragon tatoo. Cole somehow has the tatoo because he's a descendant of Scorpion, apparently you can pass the tatoo by having babies.

Dumb. There's no need to come up with explanations of how they have their powers, this is Mortal Kombat not the real world, they just have these powers and that's fine. But by coming up with this arcana stuff you end up with dumb decisions like Kano unlocking his arcana by arguing about egg rolls, Cole unlocking his by getting punched by Goro despite the fact that he's been getting punched for many years in his MMA career, Jax getting super robot arms which suddenly evolved from skinny robot arms, Sonja unlocking hers I have no idea how she unlocked hers so quick after getting her tatoo.

It's so silly and unnecessary. Some other big disappointments were Raiden and Shang-Tsung. Raiden spends the entire movie claiming he can't interfere but he does at the end. It's funny how he always shows up too late, he's like the opposite of Superman in this movie.

The 1995 Raiden was so much better. As for Shang-Tsung the only thing he does is give out some orders, takes away Kung Lao's soul without having to weaken him, and gets banished by Raiden. The 1995 Shang-Tsung had some cool fight scenes and some nice lines, this new one is just lame like this movie.