Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

This past Saturday, I headed out with a few of my martial arts students, past and present, to watch the second installment of the recent Mortal Kombat adaptations. I’m not going to lie, the draw for me was the involvement of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. Cage was never a character I played, but the retired action movie star is a fun idea for this franchise, and I will generally support anything Karl Urban does. Even when it’s bad, he’s great in it. And sometimes when it’s bad, it’s good. Ask me about my love of the 2005 film Doom one day. I never said I had great taste.

The point is, I went and saw the movie, and the short review is, I loved it (see afore mentioned note about my tastes). Let’s dive in!

My entry into the Mortal Kombat universe was the original arcade game. I was, predictably, terrible at it. But it was a great time all the same. I credit Mortal Kombat, and shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, with pointing me to my long-term, much loved hobby of martial arts training (for those who don’t know, I train and teach Kickboxing and Northern Mantis Kung Fu).

It helped that the former had a character that shared my first name, albeit with a different spelling – Sonya. You bet I played her nearly exclusively. But the game also had a plethora of female characters who, importantly for little me, went toe-to-toe with male opponents. Their victory was not conditional to their gender (though a lot of the finishers were… I got very annoyed with Sonya’s finisher when they turned it into the ‘kiss of death.’ A kiss? Really? Anyway…), but on the skill of the person who had selected her as their avatar.

Oddly enough, I didn’t much like the first of the new Mortal Kombat films. There was something about them that just didn’t jive with me. I think, upon reflection, that the problem was that it took itself entirely too seriously for the ridiculousness of the premise. Perhaps? Not entirely sure. But I wasn’t a huge fan of the first of the most recent adaptations.

That was not the case for this one. Yes, this movie is so silly. It’s not a thinker. But what it is, is really, really fun (and gory). Don’t go if you’re looking for some deeper meaning into the human condition. You won’t find it. Do go if you’re looking for some excellent action, good laughs, and a lot of blood.

The story of Mortal Kombat II largely abandons Cole as the main character, relegating him to one of the crew. Enter Johnny Cage, a washed-up action hero from the age of really cheesy, badly choreographed action films of the kind we lost in the early 90s (making this film a little meta, as it is also a really cheesy (but much better choreographed) action flick, harkening back to the kind we lost in the early 90s). You know, when action movies were dumb and fun… or sometimes just dumb. Really dumb. I particularly enjoyed the really bad action scene from one of his movies we were subjected to as a character introduction. It was horrifically bad. And that was just awesome. A perfect way to set the tone for the character and the movie.

I giggled my way through it.

For some reason, unseen by either his character or the audience, he has been selected as the replacement for Kung Lao as a defender of Earth Realm (Spoiler: Kung Lao was killed in the last movie); a call to adventure that he promptly rejects. Not that it does him much good. What I like about this is that Johnny Cage is not magically suddenly extremely good at martial arts when he is dragged into the Mortal Kombat arena. He was in his youth. But he is no longer young. And while he was a winning fighter as a young man, all of the hard work in his films were done by stunt doubles. And it shows. He doesn’t exactly perform well.

That’s all I’m going to say about it, because I don’t want to stray too far into spoiler territory.

I will say, however, that Karl Urban was very aware what kind of film this was, and very pleasingly hammed it up. So many of his scenes were flat out silly, and in it’s own self-aware way, hilarious.

To my surprise, however, that was not my greatest joy in this film. That honour once again belonged to Josh Lawson who reprised his role as Kano (he was in the trailer, so I don’t feel like this is too much of a spoiler). Kano was, to my mind, the best thing about the previous film. He also stood out here… but that might just be because of who I am and the fact that this time around he was so aggressively Australian that it very nearly killed me (I am much less aggressively Australian). I laughed hardest and loudest at his scenes. Even thinking about it now, I still giggle. It’s not often that Australia gets any kind of representation in films. In fact, the only other ensemble movie I can think of that had an explicitly Australian character was Pitch Black, and, well, he didn’t last long. To be fair, not too many characters did.

I am fairly sure that other folks of other backgrounds won’t take as much delight in Kano as I did, so I would not count on it to up the enjoyment of this film. But for me very specifically, it absolutely did.

Kano steals the show. Yet again.

The story itself is about what you’d expect for this franchise. Broadly, Earth is under threat, and heroes, under the tutelage of the lightning god Raiden, must overcome their personal limitations to rise against the foe in order to save Earthrealm from annexation. But even in this, through the figure of Johnny Cage, the film kind of makes fun of itself. Of course, the folks on the other side are up to shenanigans, and so they must be countered — both inside and outside the arena.

There are a lot of great fight scenes, a tonne of gore (which is to be expected, given the nature of the games), some unexpected deaths (no one is safe. No one. Side note: in my viewing, when one of the characters was killed someone in the front row exclaimed, “Nooooo!” quite loudly. Go see it with an audience, is what I’m saying. It was great.), and so, so many laughs. It was not deep, or profound, or even serious.

It was fun.

It evoked the old-school feeling action movies used to have: fun was the goal. I don’t know about you, but, given the state of well… everything, I desperately needed something fun. Mortal Kombat II perfectly scratched that itch. Definitely worth the cost of admission, silliness and all.

My goodness was it silly. What a good time in the cinema.

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When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. The Timbercreek Incident is free to read on Wattpad.