I still am baffled at how it could be that this a sequel to a movie that I have actually seen, because it felt like a reboot to a reboot. Like, at what point can you switch out nearly every one of the original cast and still call it a sequel? The fact that the movie features a trailer for Street Fighter isn’t exactly so much brave as it is completely clueless about its critical and artistic competition. (Reminds me to mention that I haven’t really been able to get the idea that Mario Galaxy is actually more Super Smash Bros than it is a sequel out of my head and to that point one of the coolest things about the first Mario Movie was the fact that it was able to keep the Donkey Kong cameo so deeply under wraps and then make it central to the plot, and especially the way that they made Kong into his original villain status rather than allowing every IP to valorize its protagonist regardless of the Lore. And Galaxy did such a bad job of replicating something like this in its second iteration! Glen Powell’s Star Fox is cheeky and self-reflective, a meta joke who leans more Batman in the Lego Movie than a part of the actual gang).
As someone who has recently watched the Mortal Kombat movie from the 90s for reasons completely unrelated to this one, it’s so obvious that this is an empty reboot gilding the lily on what was already a perfectly schlocky video game adaptation. The references are all updated for pop culture of the 2020s (“This Voldemort looking motherfucker,” and Johnny Cage’s musings on the public’s falling out of love with campy kung fu movies in a campy kung fu movie) grope blindly at some foothold for originality and (re-?)telling the (apparently same???) story from just a couple years ago but from fish out of water’s perspective sort of works to avoid anyone from taking themselves too seriously, and when that doesn’t work Kano shows his face and spits absolutely nasty zingers. But boy are there some lazy things going on here: Baraka, who is obviously supposed to be a standout role, is mostly a copypasta of Drax from the Guardians franchise, but more embarassingly, Predator: Badlands’s Dek, which is somehow a deeper cut. It is hard to improve upon Bridgette Wilson for Tanya (1995 was an incredible year for her: Billy Madison AND Mortal Kombat, and that’s after landing a role in The Last Action Hero two years earlier!). There is some absolutely bewildering lore dumps for seemingly tertiary characters in the third act of this movie as if it should hold some special emotional resonance. Liu Kang’s defeat in the final act is also so random that it feels like it can only exist in a business model that does not care if you like the movie or require that it follow a plot. Just some of the basic math involved in a set of torches visible over the whole planet somehow resetting based on a verbal spat between adoptive parent and child is really unsettling, although I guess it’s aLl tHe GoDs’ meddling.
Don’t really know who this movie is for, except maybe as a sorting mechanism for future movie reviewers and friends.
