The 2021 reboot of Mortal Kombat has its issues, but it more than delivers on its promise of being a faithful, entertaining Mortal Kombat movie with plenty of callbacks and winks to hardcore fans.
FOR a much-anticipated reboot of a classic, Mortal Kombat is both too much and not enough for fans.
There’s an overwhelming amount of information, but the movie doesn’t give you a reason to care about any of it.
The expression “a video-game movie” has become the byword for really bad stuff.
For good reason too, as films that use video-games as their source material almost invariably turn out to be, at best, substandard.
Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat does not really lift that curse, if that’s what it is, but for the fans of the series, it comes as a blessing.
It has its issues, and is not a flawless victory, by any stretch of imagination, but it more than delivers on its promise of being a faithful, entertaining Mortal Kombat movie with plenty of callbacks and winks to hardcore fans.
The 2021 Mortal Kombat, a reboot of the film franchise inspired by the series of fighting games that began with the 1992 arcade phenomenon of the same name, breathes new life into a genre that's been stagnant for too long.
The movie, which is now streaming on HBO Max and also in theaters, takes place on Earthrealm, where our most powerful champions are being picked off one by one by cheaters from Outworld, led by the powerful soul-munching sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Han), who is trying to stop a millennia-old fighting tournament before it even starts.
The setup is a bit like a big superhero epic, with a bunch of superpowered folks banding together to fight a common foe.
But unlike, say, The Avengers or even Justice League, Mortal Kombat doesn’t spend nearly enough time introducing its huge cast.
The first half of the almost two-hour-long movie is a blur, racing from one character to the next, while also trying to set up the rules of this unique fantasy world.
To make things worse, there isn’t actually a Mortal Kombat tournament that happens because Shang Tsung, the evil boss from The Outworld, wants to kill all champions before the tournament can happen.
This seems odd especially when The Outworld has won nine out of 10 previous tournaments with the Earth realm.
For Filipino fans, there is something to be proud of with the connection of Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, the legendary Scorpion. According to sources, Sanada starred in a movie in the Philippines decades before he was cast in Mortal Kombat.
The film he appeared in was called Sigaw ng Puso where he starred with Lorna Tolentino and Sharmaine Arnaiz.
The film was directed by Kazuki Omori and was released in 1995, produced by Premier International Corp. (NP)
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