I’m coming late to this party, even by my own self-imposed standards. Much has already been said and podcast and written about how Mortal Kombat is pretty good. Wife’s Friend, who always has good takes on movies and pop culture, had sounded off on another movie that emphasizes the importance of Bloodline. To this, I want to just quickly link to Kurt Vonnegut’s Gospel from Outer Space, since Friend gave a comic adaptation for me to read recently. Another Friend quoted NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour‘s take, “The 1990s movies weren’t good, but they were perfect,” and, “I am so glad that this movie is rated R and that the original movies were PG or my mom would’ve never let me watch them.” My brother put me over the top when he vouched for it, saying basically, “You think you’re not going to want to know the origin story for Scorpion and Subzero, but you really do.”
There aren’t that many other new movies out right now–what are you doing? Why is this a question? And since most of the readers of this blog are mentioned in the previous paragraph, there isn’t much need for me to convince you to see this movie. The genie is out of the bottle. So what follows are just a few questions and scattered thoughts for discussion in film studies college classes across America:
One of my favorite elements of this movie, which I think isn’t praised enough is the way in which this movie takes place almost entirely in the training montage sequence of the Mortal Kombat story. Friend’s take is, instead of the original movies’ approach, “There’s magic. Fuck you,” the reboot tries to explain, Why magic? I will say that I am appreciative of the fact that instead of retreading old storylines, this one tries to emphasize the evil of the Bad Guys by having them circumvent the tournament entirely. That being said, there are some things that I am still scratching my head about, like, why do the heroes of Earth only retreat to the Void after their defenses have been breached? It seems like a perfectly safe place to spend all of their time.
On that same note, the emphasis on the way that people inherit the dragon mark through mortal combat forces the audience to wonder who this milquetoast cage fighter with a distractingly old daughter killed. The protagonist, Cole Young, doesn’t have a backstory or a personality, except that he’s sort of a beta and lets people step on him a lot, so the intimation that he might have had a violent past is intriguing. When it’s clear that, no, in fact, there’s a second way to get your Elder Wand and it’s through being born to a powerful wizard, Cole Young goes back to being boring. It does make Sonya Blade seem just a little more pathetic, since she’s unlucky two different ways. Friend describes her as a kind of Mortal Kombat otaku, endlessly scouring the globe for (exclusively) men with dragon tattoos.
The reinvention of Kano as the comic relief and most self-aware character in the franchise is at once mesmerizing and joyful. I don’t know if I’m missing something, but I have this gut sense memory of Kano being the embodiment of toxic masculinity, licking his chops at Sonya any time he’s on screen, and this movie completely removes the sting of his misogyny. He still has a few moments when he runs through a litany of gay-bashing insults, but the qualities that marked him as a Baddie in the original are lacking in what is sure to be a case study on rehabilitating villains in reboots someday. Kano is gifted with some of the best lines of the movie, including, “Fucking whoops,” and nerdy pop culture references galore. His ability to be bought for next to nothing and his childlike naivete are lovable plot points: Sonya Blade convinces him to set his capture and imprisonment aside in order to lead them to an ancient temple for the low price of 1 million USD, a price Blade has no intention or ability of paying. So when the Baddie Cabal silver tongues Kano later with this gem, “Name your price then double it then double it again,” we the audience are given permission to laugh at Kano’s clear difficulty mathing out a whopping 4 million to turn in his newfound friends.
Why are there a “dwindling” number of Chosen, exactly? If every one who’s marked is either killed or passes their mark to their offspring, the only way for these supposed prize fighters of Earth to lose their mark would be to live a life of chastity and die in peace. Though it’s tempting to imagine that this is the alternate reality where every fighter on Earth pulls a Cincinnatus and slips off into the Great Beyond while taking a nice warm bath at the ripe old age of 110, I don’t really understand the Dragon Tattoo rules.
The group fighting and permutations of powers is an excellent lesson learned from the Marvel movies and goes back to the fundamentals of comic book movies that I’ve written about briefly in the some of the earliest meditations of this blog. Lastly, it would’ve been cooler if Jax had burst his own arm in order to get free from Subzero. I understand this is an opportunity for Subzero to earn his evil card, but Jax also needs to earn his badass card and we’re sort of caught in a Catch 22.
For the most part, the reboot holds onto a lot of the Fuck You, Magic of the original: at one point after a very conventional fight with absolutely no razzle dazzle, a corpse bursts into flames like a Chinese firework invading a Japanese compound. If you enjoyed the original, you’re old now.
