The tournament the first film promised finally arrives, and Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage is worth the wait. Little around him is: the fights blur into one another, Outworld looks unfinished, and the story is a run of cutscenes between the finishing moves.
Simon McQuoid’s first Mortal Kombat, from 2021, spent its running time promising a tournament and then stopped before the bell. The sequel, from a script by Jeremy Slater, puts that right with some force. The contest is under way early, Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) waits at the top of the card as the prize the others are fighting towards, and roughly every quarter of an hour somebody is pulled apart on camera. It is a film that has read the complaints about its predecessor and answered each of them in turn, and it has spent most of its energy on the fixes.
Karl Urban is the reason to go, if you go. His Johnny Cage is a Hollywood action star who arrives with an entrance, a catchphrase and a settled belief that the camera is on him, and Urban plays the vanity straight enough that the jokes come out of the man rather than being pinned to him. We laughed properly at his first walk into the arena. About forty minutes later we noticed we had not laughed since, because Slater has given him one joke and asked him to tell it in different rooms. Josh Lawson’s Kano works the same seam and gets slightly more out of it. Adeline Rudolph’s Kitana is the only person here with something like an inner life; she watches the fights as though the outcome will cost her, and the film is better whenever it remembers she is in it.
The early bouts are the best of it. They are one against one, the rules are clear, and the editor, Stuart Levy, lets each shot run long enough for a punch to be seen arriving and landing. The finishing moves are staged with real relish, spines and skulls and a great deal of arterial spray, and the 15 certificate is not a formality. Then the fights multiply. By the second hour the camera has moved in close, the cuts have shortened, and on more than one occasion we could not have told you who was hitting whom or why it mattered.
The world does not help. Stephen F. Windon shoots Outworld in slate and rust, and Yohei Taneda’s thrones, pits and stairways stand in front of skies that never seem further away than the back wall of a stage. Nothing has weight. A fighter is thrown thirty feet into a pillar and the pillar does not react. Cappi Ireland’s costumes are the one department that reads clearly: you can tell the combatants apart by what they are wearing long after you have stopped telling them apart by anything else. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score starts the drums when a fight starts and stops them when it stops.
We were bored, somewhere around the fourth fight in the same arena, and then we were annoyed about being bored, because a film with this many people being cut in half ought not to feel like a wait. The trouble is that nothing connects one fight to the next except the fact that both are on the schedule. Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks) and Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) are each handed a scene and then parked. Chin Han’s Shang Tsung and Damon Herriman’s Quan Chi hiss at each other across a throne room and are given no reason to. Joe Taslim, who carried The Raid in 2011, is here as Bi-Han and spends most of the film waiting for a cue.
Against the 1995 film this is bloodier, better acted and no more fun. Against the other game adaptations of the past few years it looks like something dug out of a cupboard: the same dim palette, the same stone corridors, the same idea that a tournament can stand in for a story. Most critics have split almost exactly down the middle on it, and having sat through it we understand both halves. The people who wanted the fatalities have got them. The people who wanted a film around them are still waiting.
At 116 minutes it is not long, and Urban and Lawson keep it moving for stretches. See it in a cinema if the finishing moves are what you paid for the first time and did not get; at home the arena shrinks and the jokes have nowhere to go. Either way, do not expect to remember the order of the fights by the weekend.
