Also rented (on iTunes) a heartbreaking work of staggering genius called Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge. Half of the last sentence is as exaggerated as this absent-minded video game tie-in movie.
So this animated film is based on the classic (klassic?) video game series of the same name. It follows a bunch of characters (Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and more) who travel to the Mortal Kombat tournament to defend Earthrealm against the evil forces from other dimensions who want to take over.
This is more-or-less the plot of a game that didn’t spend a lot of time on its story… and it shows since the Johnny Cage character spends the movie mocking the plot of his own movie. Whether or not this is story-accurate to the characters and its increasingly more complex plot, I don’t know. I don’t follow the games. I did recognize some cheeky in-jokes and references though… if nothing else, the people who made this flick were fans of the source material. And that matters.
There’s not a lot to this movie… mostly it’s just animated fighters fighting each other. To the film’s credit, it’s extremely violent and gory, including the x-ray impacts to blood and bone from the later Mortal Kombat games. In fact, I’d wager the movie spends more time and money showing the grisly consequences of these fights than it does on actually animated a good looking movie. This movie has, frankly, really cheap, low-rent animation. I guess it gets the job done though… it’s not unwatchably cheap. But a little more effort would have been appreciated.
Nobody but a video game and Mortal Kombat fan need watch this movie. For gamers though, I think you’ll get enough out of it to be worth the sub-90 minutes it asks of your time. If you don’t know Mortal Kombat at all and have no interested in animated kung-fu and gore, stay away. As is, for a gamer vaguely familiar with the series, it barely crosses the finishing line with a hazy positive. Hard core Mortal Kombat fans may love it.
Score: 71