Originally Posted by
Shadaloo
People saying "whatever the fuck Mortal Kombat's story is" are likely part of the real target audience for this thing - casual moviegoers that don't give much of a shit about the world and its history and characters. And I'm not saying that to be insulting: WB is banking on the blood and violence being the real draw for this. You can see it in the marketing.
I get that the popular draw for MK is violence and gore, of course - it's what made it famous, after all, but it was only ever the icing on the cake for me. I fell in love with the universe, plot and characters. I expect so little from that and I'm still disappointed.
It's frustrating to me on a few levels. Like...they've had nearly thirty years to flesh out this huge universe, and at this point saying "whatever MK's story is" is tantamount to "whatever the fuck Batman/insert comic series' story is. Stupid or not, there is a narrative - MK was, yes, always Enter The Dragon with more supernatural, horror/sci-fi aspects thrown in. There's a cast of supporting characters. There's a cast of bad guys, and all of whom do have a surprising amount of history with each other. Good guys go to a tournament to save the world from extra-dimensional evil bad guys and it kicks off from there. You would expect to see those things at the bare minimum, and...yet we're getting a movie mostly about a studio-created original character that basically exists because the filmmakers didn't have enough faith in the characters that were already there in the first place. There's no damn reason Johnny fucking Cage should not be present here, and yet...
To me, MK 1995 WAS a real MK movie. For all it matters, its violence was PG-13, but hell, you still had dudes being impaled on spikes. And I kinda feel like the choices this movie makes are straight up a result of trying to do the few things that film couldn't. Like Scorpion vs. Sub-Zero. Like hard R-rated gore. So you've got one movie that has fights as part of the tournament story, and another movie that uses its story as an excuse to show fights and murder people.
But I don't necessarily need people being torn to shreds to have a good MK experience - what I need is to feel like I'm in that universe - the Shaw Bros. Chinese Kung-fu atmosphere, the twisted, desolate ruins of Outworld. Instead I got a frozen warehouse and somebody's fucking backyard while I basically just watch re-enactments of the game's special moves and finishers, like that's all that's worth paying attention to.
"Daddy, use your uppercut!" - An actual quote.
There were episodes of the fucking 90's cartoon that were written better than this thing.
Engaging characters. Not a goddamned one of those to be found here. 'Cept Kano.