Rent Mortal Kombat on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Ed Boon & John Tobias (video games), Kevin Droney (written by)
Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Christopher Lambert, Robin Shou, Linden Ashby, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Bridgett Wilson-Sampras, Talisa Soto
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer
Plot
Three unknowing martial artists are summoned to a mysterious island to compete in a tournament whose outcome will decide the fate of the world.
Verdict
It's a moderately entertaining B-movie. The plot is certainly better than the 2021 reboot, but the CGI effects have aged poorly. This is a fight movie and that's basically what we get. While the fighting may have been serviceable at the time, at this point it looks sub-par.
Skip it.
Review
After watching the 2021 Mortal Kombat, I revisited the original. It's hard not to compare these. This is not a movie concerned about characters and development. The story isn't bad, certainly better than the reboot. This focuses on the fighting, but it just doesn't look good. Maybe it did at the time, but movies like John Wick have raised the bar on how a fight should look.
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| Talisa Soto, Robin Shou, Christopher Lambert, Bridgett Wilson-Sampras, Linden Ashby |
This movie is cheesy. I don't know if it's trying to be serious or if this is some kind of spoof. A lot of the dialog borders on comical, but that seems like the script trying too hard for dialog to be a collection of one liners. The actors seem to be taking this seriously, but Raiden (Christopher Lambert) seems comical. The actor is taking this too seriously.
This provides a brief introduction to the characters with Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Liu Kang as the leads. They're quickly taken to the Outworld for the tournament. This movie is fight heavy as it should be, and the structure of the plot corrects the issues I have with the reboot. Unfortunately the fights are little more than throws and kicks. It feels a lot more like a dance routine that a fight. At one point we get a montage of people hitting the ground as a substitute for actual fighting. Choreography has come a long way since this movie. Sub-zero and Scorpion are boring bad guys there just for the good guys to defeat.
Goro is a puppet. You can tell he's not CGI as he doesn't look like a cartoon. It required fifteen people to operate.
Both the 1995 and 2021 versions are rough. The 1995 version has a better plot, and it only lacks comparatively in CGI and fight choreography which wasn't bad at the time.
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