After sitting through ninety minutes of shit, the original Mortal Kombat movie left us with a cliffhanger, letting us know that the movie we had just watched had all been for naught. The good guys would have to fight the bad guys all over again, only this time the movie would be even worse.
Not even Christopher Lambert would lower himself to appear in this movie. Meanwhile, we got to see Shao Kahn without his mask. What do we get underneath the skull? A guy who most likely jerks off to old National Geographic magazines.
Although there is fighting, the fighting still sucks. I’m not convinced that any of the movie’s fight choreographers actually knew any martial arts, though I’m sure they’ve at least seen a few other movies that contained fighting. A lot of the moves from the game are included in the movie, but aside from some of the cool fatalities, most of them are pretty generic. Just normal punches and kicks.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation incorporates all of the dramatic emotion of a thirteen year-old Goth kid’s shitty poem that he worked on for all of ten minutes before posting it on the Internet. When Lui Kang cries out in his dream for his dead brother, Kung Lao, you can’t help but think, “Damn, he’s got big hair.”
This movie attempts to incorporate characters from both Mortal Kombat 2 and 3, meaning that there are way too many characters. Characters are introduced just long enough to be defeated in a fight. The end result is a feeling of randomness for almost every fight in the movie. It also means that most of the fights fail to last much longer than a minute or two, but that’s okay, since neither of the actors knew very many martial arts moves.
As the movie reaches its climax, we get to experience some important life lessons, such as metal arms are not as strong as flesh arms, and the people who made Mortal Kombat: Annihilation have some serious head injuries that need immediate care.
Movie Quality: Do you ever get that feeling first thing in the morning, like you can tell someone in the world has just died a horrible death? It’s an indescribably, uneasy feeling of despair that will continue to plague for months after you see this movie.
Faithfulness to the Game: For a game that got a lot of attention for its gore content, the movie had so little gore that it was almost insulting. One thing that I do remember about the game is that I enjoyed playing it. As for the movie, it drove me to stab the guy at Hollywood Video who actually allowed me to rent this. After showing the movie to the cops, I actually got a reward.
