Mortal Kombat

Enjoyed it overall but the story was meh. Loved that they had goro and other characters and that they also alluded to characters like kitana by showing off her fan and stuff. I wish that there was a tournament in the film and they stuck closer to the Mortal kombat story. Cole Young was not a very good character in my opinion.

Mortal Kombat shows off some amazing design and stunt work, but the writing keeps it from everything fans wanted it to be. Hopefully, the sequel will learn from these shortcomings. I would be lying if I said Mortal Kombat (2021) was everything I had hoped. But I also enjoyed it and hope the sequel does happen someday soon. Pros: * The character roster was pretty big for a first outing, and I appreciated seeing so many of my favorites right off the bat. * The costuming and aesthetics were stunning. I immediately recognized each character because their designs held true to the games while still being updated and modernized. The attention to detail was incredible. * Josh Lawson surprised, making Kano undoubtedly the most entertaining part of this movie. * Casting some true martial artists like Joe Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada gave the action more skill and grit. * The R rating was the right fit for Mortal Kombat, allowing the gore-filled fatalities fans have come to love in the games. Cons: * With a massive payer of characters to choose from in the Mortal Kombat universe, the addition of Lewis Tan’s Cole Young was unnecessary and annoying. A dozen existing characters could have served as the audience’s perspective. * Adapting a fantastical and violent video game to a feature film is no simple task. However, Kevin Tancharoen perfectly grounded the Mortal Kombat story while keeping the magic and fantasy roots in Mortal Kombat: Legacy (2011). Unfortunately, Simon McQuoid struggled with that balance, resulting in a script that felt like the CW team wrote. * The whole Arcana superpower thing stripped the need for skill from some of the fighters, becoming a disappointing dues ex machina. I would have preferred better writing. All in all, there were more pros than cons, but the cons took what could have been great and made it decent. All the pros give me hope that Mortal Kombat 2 can fix the cons and make a much better sequel. Fingers crossed!

OK... my wife is the Mortal Kombat fan of the family, and the fighting game fan of the family. So this should really be her review... because I'm just going to trash it. The problem here is plot, as in they actually tried to add in a real plot. Mortal Kombat is a fighting game. You play it to peacefully beat your friends to a bloody pulp... and that is where the fun is. But they added a plot. In Twister, the star of the show was the tornado. The plot was there to move the view from tornado to tornado. And in Back Draft, it was the same... with fire. Mortal Kombat thought it had to be deep. It thought it had to be something more than it a tournament. It thought the characters had to have more than surface level depth. THE DIDN'T. The Tournament should have been the star. The plot should have only been there to move you from fight to fight with a climax that shouted "FATALITY!" and left it at that. Instead they tried to add depth where no depth was needed... and that killed the fun of Mortal Kombat. Not every movie needs to have a plot and characters, some movies work best as mindless popcorn munching escapism.