Mortal Kombat (2021) Retrospective Review - A Solid Round One
When the original Mortal Kombat arcade game arrived in 1992, it promptly caused a moral panic significant enough to contribute to the creation of the ESRB ratings system. Because make no mistake: Mortal Kombat was all about the fatalities. The spine rips. The decapitations. The gleefully excessive acts of pixelated violence that sent parents to Congress and sent teenagers back to the arcade with fistfuls of quarters. The game understood something fundamental about its audience: that the transgression was the point. That the appeal was not merely competitive but almost ritualistic – a shared experience of witnessing something that felt genuinely forbidden.
The 1995 film adaptation, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, understood this too, but arrived at precisely the wrong moment to fully embrace it. Constrained to a PG-13 rating, it sublimated the gore into something slicker and kitschier – a gloriously fun Hong Kong action pastiche that was, by the standards of video game adaptations at the time, something close to a miracle of competence. It made $122 million. It spawned a sequel. And then it slowly aged into a time capsule of a very specific kind of 1990s cheese – fondly remembered, rarely rewatched, and thoroughly outpaced by everything that The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon subsequently did to Hollywood fight choreography.
By the time Simon McQuoid’s 2021 reboot arrived, the landscape had shifted considerably. The video game movie curse – that long, dismal parade of failures stretching from the original live-action Super Mario Bros. film through decades of Uwe Boll atrocities – had finally been broken, roughly around 2018, by a generation of filmmakers willing to treat their source material with genuine respect rather than embarrassed condescension. Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat arrived into this more hospitable climate with an R-rating, a $55 million budget, and a creative mandate to finally give the franchise what its fans had always felt it deserved.
What it gave them was, by any honest accounting, pretty solid. The film opens with its best sequence – a prologue set in 17th century Japan, following Hanzo Hasashi, the warrior who will eventually become Scorpion, in the aftermath of his family's massacre at the hands of the ice-wielding assassin Bi-Han, the man who will become Sub-Zero. It is a sequence of genuine visual and emotional power, and it establishes something the rest of the film only intermittently sustains: the sense that there are real human stakes embedded within all the supernatural carnage. The blood feud between Scorpion and Sub-Zero is the oldest kind of story – vengeance, loss, the cycle of violence across generations – and the film is at its most compelling when it remembers that this is what it is actually about.
The narrative pivot to MMA fighter Cole Young – an original creation introduced to place the fan-favorite Scorpion firmly at the center of the narrative – is the film’s most debated creative choice, and not without reason. Cole exists primarily as a vessel for exposition, a naive newcomer through whose eyes the world of Mortal Kombat can be explained without the screenplay having to work too hard. Lewis Tan brings genuine physicality to the role and more charm than the writing strictly deserves, perpetually overshadowed by the icons surrounding him.
Those icons, to the film’s considerable credit, are handled with real affection and occasional brilliance. Josh Lawson's Kano is the most purely entertaining presence in the film – a foul-mouthed mercenary of uncertain loyalty whose broad comedic energy provides welcome relief from the mythological heavy lifting happening around him. Ludi Lin’s Liu Kang is given less to do than the franchise’s central figure deserves, but brings enough presence to suggest that a sequel giving him more space would be well worth seeing. Tadanobu Asano’s Lord Raiden is appropriately inscrutable, and Joe Taslim’s Sub-Zero is a genuinely menacing physical presence – cold, precise, and visually spectacular in every sequence the film gives him.
The fight choreography is, for the most part, the real achievement here. McQuoid comes from an advertising background, and whatever limitations that brings to narrative construction, it has given him a precise eye for visual spectacle. The action sequences combine genuine martial arts craft with the increasingly elaborate special effects required to render the fighters’ supernatural abilities – arcana, in the film’s terminology – with convincing physicality. Sub-Zero’s manipulation of ice, Kung Lao’s razor-edged hat, Kano’s laser eye: these could easily tip into self-parody, and occasionally they do, but more often they are executed with exactly the right balance of commitment and self-awareness.
And the fatalities. Let us discuss the fatalities. The film earns its R-rating with an enthusiasm that feels less like gratuitous shock value than like a genuine act of fidelity to what the franchise has always been. The violence is cartoonishly extreme in precisely the way the games always were – ghoulishly creative, often darkly comedic, and designed to produce a very specific audience reaction that falls somewhere between horror and delighted laughter. It is, in its own way, a form of respect. The filmmakers understood that the fans did not want the violence sanitized. They wanted to see what they had always imagined seeing on screen.
Where the film stumbles is in the machinery connecting its set pieces. The screenplay, by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham, is occupied primarily with assembling its ensemble – a round-up-the-gang structure that prioritizes introduction over development and leaves several characters feeling more like placeholders awaiting a sequel than fully realized presences in their own right. Sonya Blade in particular, played capably by Jessica McNamee, deserves considerably more than she is given.
These are the limitations of a franchise-builder rather than a self-contained film – a first chapter that is more interested in establishing the world than in fully inhabiting it. In that respect, the 2021 iteration of Mortal Kombat is precisely what it set out to be: a confident, R-rated foundation for something larger. And with the sequel now arriving – shifting focus to Johnny Cage, the franchise’s most flamboyant personality, in what may signal a rotating ensemble approach across this entire series – that foundation has genuine potential to support something even better than what it has produced so far.
What 2021’s Mortal Kombat ultimately achieved was something that its 1990s predecessors, for all their nostalgic charm, never quite managed: a film that works on its own terms rather than simply on the forgiving terms of “good for a video game movie.” It is imperfect, sometimes clumsy, and occasionally more interested in its own mythology than in the audience it is asking to care about that mythology.
But it is also genuinely exciting in ways that matter. It takes its source material seriously without losing its sense of humor about how seriously its source material should be taken, and it delivers, with considerable gusto, exactly what it promises. And in a franchise built on the spectacle of the finishing move, knowing exactly what you are and committing to it fully is its own kind of flawless victory.