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Mortal Kombat 2021…
- Punch. Kick. Punch.
- Kick. Punch. Kick.
- Good guy kills bad guy.
- Bad guy kills good guy.
- There’s a sulky teenager.
- There’s a fatality with a heart being ripped out.
- There’s a macho wanker called Kano.
- There’s a ridiciulous blarp of pointless CGI, where everyone gets out-acted by a barrel of water falling over, and cascading down a step.
S - ometimes there are extraneous fatalities of third parties.
- Sometimes there is tedious inconsequential dialogue to pad out the running time to a ridiculous (for this sort of film) 110 minutes.
At least it’s nice and gory at times, one fight featuring a sword straight into the top of a baddie’s head. However, in each fight, who will win? Will you care? I didn’t.
The baddie of the piece is Sub Zero, causing death and destruction everywhere he goes, and now he’s after Hanzo Hasashi, aka Scorpion. He’s the old guard, but the new blood is Lewis Tan (above) as Cole Young, the ‘chosen one’, a cage fighter who’s more of a meathead than a tin of Pedigree Chum.
He has a moronic friend, Jax (Mehcad Brooks), who thinks he can stop Sub Zero, despite having no super-powers… yet.
Such altercations include macho man vs beast, and token good female vs token bad female – and rather than on normal ground, why not move 3 feet to a precarious ledge and do battle there? And when the good guys team up, it’s hardly Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Quite frankly, while I prefer Soul Calibur over any of these fighting games, you can’t make a decent film out of this sort of thing, because the whole fun is about PLAYING A GAME, not watching disconnected nonsense.
Oh, and it’s snowing in July when Sub Zero comes knocking… or, it’s an episode of Doctors that was filmed months ago, and when it actually snowed, it was still later than normal, because Greta Thunberg created global warming.
1/10 for some amusing fatalities, but beyond that, the pedestrian white text scrolling end credits were more interesting than the rest of it.
Oh, and after watching it, I learned that for the IMAX version, some scenes open up to 1.90:1. However, those are something no-one will see, so why not the hell just open them up for the home version? Same goes for the scenes we missed out on in 1.43:1 in Wonder Woman 1984, which could’ve and should’ve been shown in 16:9 for the home version.
Mortal Kombat 2021 is out now on HBO Max in the US, but isn’t yet available in the UK. It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, either.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 110 minutes
Release date: April 23rd 2021
Studio: Warner Bros
Format: 2.39:1 (ARRIRAW (4.5K), Anamorphic Panavision, Ultra Panavision 70 (anamorphic)); 1.90:1 (some scenes: IMAX version)
Rating: 1/10
Director: Simon McQuoid
Producer: Todd Garner, Simon McQuoid, E Bennett Walsh, James Wan
Screenplay: Greg Russo, Dave Callaham
Story (yes, really!): Oren Uziel, Greg Russo
Videogame created by: Ed Boon, John Tobias
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch
Cast:
Cole Young: Lewis Tan
Sonya Blade: Jessica McNamee
Kano: Josh Lawson
Bi-Han / Sub-Zero: Joe Taslim
Jax: Mehcad Brooks
Emily: Matilda Kimber
Allison: Laura Brent
Lord Raiden: Tadanobu Asano
Hanzo Hasashi / Scorpion: Hiroyuki Sanada
Shang Tsung: Chin Han
Liu Kang: Ludi Lin
Kung Lao: Max Huang
Mileena: Sisi Stringer
Nitara: Mel Jarnson
Reiko: Nathan Jones
Kabal: Daniel Nelson
Ramirez: Ian Streetz
Harumi Hasashi: Yukiko Shinohara
Satoshi ‘Jubei’ Hasashi: Ren Miyagawa
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.