Simon McQuoid’s ‘Mortal Kombat II’ hits theatres at a time when the video game movie curse is supposed to be dead, but this sequel proves that old habits die hard. Back in the day, the arcade era was defined by the quarter-burning rivalry between Street Fighter II and the far more brutal Mortal Kombat. Both left an absolute footprint on pop culture and scored mid-90s films. But while a Street Fighter reboot is gearing up to try its luck later this year, Mortal Kombat is already on its second round after a mediocre 2021 outing that delivered on gory fatalities but completely dropped the ball on storytelling.
Returning to the director’s chair alongside screenwriter Jeremy Slater, McQuoid serves up more of the exact same recipe. The film operates under the assumption that you already know the lore. If you don’t, prepare for a series of jarring, clunky exposition drops surrounded by some incredibly stilted dialogue. It’s the kind of script that earns laughs it didn’t mean to, but let’s be honest: nobody buys a ticket to a Mortal Kombat movie looking for Shakespeare. You’re here for the fights.
The biggest win this time around is that the filmmakers realised building a franchise around a boring, invented protagonist was a mistake. Instead, the sequel wisely pivots to a legitimate fan favourite: Johnny Cage. He’s played by Karl Urban, who brings his signature seismic smirk and bad attitude to the screen.
This version swaps out Cage’s classic Hollywood narcissism for a washed-up, gritty reality. He’s an ageing action star grinding out a living signing autographs and selling old DVDs at low-rent conventions. Urban leans into the pathetic humor of the situation perfectly, generating the film’s only genuine laughs.
The second narrative thread follows Princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who is fueled by a classic, cold-blooded revenge plot. As a kid, she watched the power-mad emperor Shao Kahn (a massive, ominous Martyn Ford) execute her father after a brutal realm-defining tournament. Kahn took the realm and took Kitana as a trophy daughter, but she’s spent the intervening years training to tear his empire down from the inside.
The two storylines collide when Shao Kahn turns his sights on Earthrealm. The rules of engagement are simple: a one-on-one tournament to the death. Kitana is locked in as one of Kahn’s five heavy hitters, but Earthrealm is down a man. Enter Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), who recruits a desperate Johnny Cage to fight for the survival of the planet.
On paper, Johnny’s shot at redemption and Kitana’s coup should give the movie some structural bones. In execution, it’s just a flimsy clothesline used to hang as many game cameos as humanly possible. The film rushes from one arena to the next, treating its characters like a checklist for the fans. While that fan service keeps the engine running initially, the structure falls apart because the fight choreography gets increasingly repetitious instead of escalating the stakes.
To its credit, Mortal Kombat II delivers exactly what the R-rating demands early on, the fatalities are gloriously gruesome, and the practical gore hits the mark. But once you get past Urban’s charisma, the rest of the cast is trapped in thinly sketched character skins that barely register.
Instead of building tension or giving us a reason to root for Earth’s defenders, the movie puts all its energy into magical portals, ancient amulets, and stolen god powers. Once the martial arts sequences start blurring together into a mess of green screen and CGI, there’s simply not enough substance left to hold your attention. It’s an upgrade from the 2021 film, but it still runs out of quarters before the final round.
If you’re just looking for blood, guts, and Karl Urban being a sarcastic bastard, this round might satisfy your nostalgia. But if you’re looking for a martial arts epic with actual teeth, you’re better off staying in the arcade.
7/10
