Not exactly a knockout.
TWITTER
4/23/2021
A quarter-century has passed since Hollywood first adapted the arcade classic
Mortal Kombat, with a film that launched newcomer Paul W.S. Anderson into his career making bad but extremely profitable movies full of CG mayhem (and a side career flummoxing those casual moviegoers who confuse him with two similarly named but slightly more brilliant auteurs).
This year the newcomer is Simon McQuoid, whose version of
Mortal Kombat ditches original character Johnny Cage but revives most others dating back to Midway’s 1992 game. A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe. While gaming die-hards may enjoy this riff on familiar characters and kills,