The new
Mortal Kombat movie is bad.
Sure, maybe you enjoyed it. Maybe it scratched a specific itch for you. Maybe it surpassed your low standards. But let’s be honest with ourselves here: it’s a bad movie, a misfire that somehow manages to ignore what makes its source material such goofy, compelling fun while also failing as an actual piece of cinema.
I’m not here to write a review of
Mortal Kombat. We already have one of those. I’m here to talk about the worst part of the new film, the element that ground my gears to dust and made it clear that this take on the obscenely violent and utterly ridiculous video game franchise didn’t understand the appeal of those games. This is an aspect that even Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 film – itself an imperfect, rubbery pile of nonsense – managed to get right. In other words: no excuses.