Mortal Kombat 2 movie reviews are in, and it's being called everything from 'enjoyably violent' to 'depressingly rizzless '

JESSICA MCNAMEE as Sonya Blade, TADANOBU ASANO as Lord Raiden, and LEWIS TAN as Cole Young in New Line Cinema’s “Mortal Kombat II,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. — (Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

The Mortal Kombat 2 movie comes out Friday May 8, and early reviews have begun emerging from the portal. Does the sequel right the wrongs of the first film, which oddly didn't even feature a Mortal Kombat tournament? Is Karl Urban an improvement over… uh, whoever that main guy was in the first movie? Does someone else get cut in half lengthwise by a hat?

Let's find out. Not by going to the movie itself—I unfortunately couldn't make it to a press screening—but by seeing what some other outlets thought of the sequel. Early opinions seem pretty mixed, with some reviewers liking all the action but others unhappy to find a distinct lack of anything but action.

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Awarding it a score of 3/5, Jordan Farley says the sequel "lands some killer blows" but is "far from a flawless victory." Farley says MK 2 is a step up from 2021's Mortal Kombat—though that's a pretty low bar to hurdle. Karl Urban as Johnny Cage "has undergone a Deadpool personality transplant, with the character riffing on everything from Squid Game and Harry Potter to Big Trouble in Little China and The Lord of the Rings," making the sequel more fun than "its strangely self-serious predecessor."

Max Scoville says the sequel "doesn’t waste any time delivering on everything the first film took time setting up." While MK 2 "might not be Oscar-caliber cinema," Scoville says, "it’s big and loud and gruesome and not afraid to have fun." The sequel "fully understands that its appeal lies in the thrill of seeing characters tear each other apart, not so much their motivations for doing so."

Rhiannon Bevan says MK 2 is "great Kitana movie, and a bad Johnny Cage movie," saying Karl Urban isn't miscast but "misused," with his characterization "so egregiously boring at times that it gives Urban little to work with." Fortunately, "Mortal Kombat 2 has a deep respect for the worlds created in the games, and uses them as a starting point to give us the best scenes in the film, whenever we’re in Outworld."

MK2 brings "much more of the recent games' lore and aesthetic with them while keeping the strong focus on the fight sequences and an earnest take on the material," says Bill Bria. Calling it "a peanut butter and chocolate mix of a film," Bria says it's "easily one of the biggest surprises of the year," and "while not every little thing in the film works, it's honestly a little astonishing how much of it does."

"The bar is in hell for video game movies, huh?" asks Kristy Puchko. MK2 is "another ugly, nonsensical mess," and is "another example of good trailer, bad movie." Karl Urban's Cage feels "wedged in" instead of the focus of the film, and as his "clichéd plot line demands he become a selfless, brave hero, he becomes more grave and less giggle-inducing."

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.