This video-game adaptation sequel is stupid, yes, but it’s also stupidly entertaining.
As a child in the 1970s, I was fixated on Saturday-morning cartoons and their loud, colorful, nonsensical entertainment. When I became a teen in the ’80s, Saturday afternoons meant Kung Fu Theater, a syndicated television offering, in which badly-dubbed would-be Bruce Lees committed martial-arts mayhem in choppy plots rendered even more confusing by TV editing. Put them all together with a how-do-you-do and you get Mortal Kombat II, a rollicking sensation machine that means nothing while delivering constant entertainment.
I reviewed and then promptly forgot 2021’s Mortal Kombat reboot — in my defense, it was one of those lockdown movies that went directly to streaming and was then barely spoken of again — so I have no strong feelings about the lady who shoots pink energy pulses out of her wrists or the guy who can summon fire or the guy with the robot arms or the guy with the buzzsaw sombrero. Anyone keeping up with Kombat lore will be pleased to learn that all those characters, and more, are here.
For the rest of us, the film offers Johnny Cage, played by a very game Karl Urban. Johnny was a big action star in the 1990s, but now he’s reduced to hanging out at nostalgia conventions where his merch-and-autograph booth is pointedly ignored by passers-by. But even if Johnny’s Hollywood career is over, his fighting prowess makes him one of a handful of Earth’s combatants selected by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to fight in an inter-dimensional tournament that will decide the fate of humanity. It doesn’t matter, they just show up and pick him.) Cage finds the whole premise dubious and ludicrous, which will come as a relief to any audience members who feel the same way.
Said tournament involves an intergalactic Big Bad known as Shao Khan (Martin Ford), who takes over dimensions by besting their fiercest warriors in deadly hand-to-hand fighting; in a tournament 20 years earlier, he killed the father of Kitana (Adeline Rudolph, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and raised her as his own. She’s been carrying a grudge against her homicidal stepdad and is secretly working to help Earth’s fighters overcome him — but Shao Khan has other tricks up his sleeve.
Revived corpses, laser eyeballs, a Zen afterlife, fang-faced aliens, a ruthless sorcerer who skulks about like Joan Crawford – Mortal Kombat II throws one nutty idea after another at the screen, and the results are delightful nonsense. And given how many IP adaptations give us all the nonsense and none of the delight, returning director Simon McQuoid and franchise-newbie screenwriter Jeremy Slater (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) deserve praise for keeping this balloon afloat.
They’re assisted in this regard by editor Stuart Levy (Foxcatcher) who, by the film’s climax, must cut smoothly between three different battles in three different dimensions. (Every location has its own color coding, as does every character’s superpower, which also helps keep events easy to follow.) Benjamin Wallfisch’s score probably cost the world a kettle drum, but it’s appropriately driving and overblown throughout, with no shortage of operatic choruses underscoring the action.
Urban has never been funnier, and he makes Johnny’s character arc from cynical Hollywood burnout to a champion capable of self-sacrifice a believable one. Not that many people are buying to tickets to Mortal Kombat II for the character arcs, granted, but Urban’s performance is a delightfully unexpected pleasure in a movie that winds up being full of them.