I saw the original Mortal Kombat film in theaters about 100 years ago, give or take, and it was bad but also really good. It was the '90s and I was going through kind of a Christopher Lambert phase (if you ever have the chance to see The Hunted, I highly recommend it), and it's also possible that I may have been mildly hammered. But the film itself has an underlying earnestness, and some really good choreography, that elevates it above the cheese line and into the realm of Legitimately Good Videogame Movie. (Plus there's that guy who yells "Mortal Kombat!" That guy rocked.)
I bring all this up because the trailer for Mortal Kombat 2—the one with Karl Urban as Johnny Cage—is here, and, well, I can't say it fills me with confidence. Maybe it's not fair to be overly critical of the dialog in a New Line Cinema flick about some interdimensional Kumite, but lines like "How are you doing that?" and "It's time to become the hero you were meant to be" clang like they were written by George Lucas.
What little there is to see of the fights don't strike me as all that exciting either: There's not much revealed in the way of superpowered pugilism at this point, no, and maybe I've been spoiled by the games, but the direct-to-DVD-caliber CGI fatality at the end of the clip leaves me flat. It's also odd that the protagonist of the 2021 flick, who wasn't in any of the games, has seemingly been reduced to a bit player in the sequel without a single line in the trailer.
The X-factor here is, of course, Karl Urban. Has he ever been in a bad movie? Well, yes, quite a few of them in fact. But he's always the best part of them, too, and no matter what else is going on there's always a chance he'll pull it out of the fire. Remember Pathfinder? Not great! Yet somehow, awesome.
It's also possible that I'm being too much of a Doubting Thomas here, because the reaction to the trailer on YouTube is enormously positive—and open-eyed about how it's likely to work out.
We'll find out in a few months: Mortal Kombat 2 debuts in theaters on October 24.
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