By Nick Nitkowski

I feel as though everyone knows what “Mortal Kombat” is, right? Even if you never played the games, you know what it is. At the very least, you must have heard the theme called “Techno Syndrome” that was made popular by the 1995 adaptation of “Mortal Kombat” so much so that it’s still a staple even for the new adaptations. Speaking of which, after five years since the release of the new adaptation of “Mortal Kombat”, we now finally have a sequel to it that was originally supposed to release in October of 2025, but for some reason was pushed back to now. Why that was the case, I still don’t know, but nonetheless, “Mortal Kombat II” is here, and it’s time to test its might!

After the events of the last movie in which there was infamously no Mortal Kombat tournament at all, the actual Mortal Kombat Tournament is finally upon us! While Outworld already has its ruthless champions lead by Shao Kahn ready to win its tenth tournament in a row and resulting in full control of all worlds, Earthrealm’s champions lead by Raiden still needs one more champion in order to compete… a washed-up action movie star Johnny Cage. With the help of Sonya Blade, Jax Briggs, Cole Young, and Liu Kang, they will compete and fight to the death in order to save Earthrealm from annihilation. 

This movie was so much fun! Way more fun than I was expecting it to be. Like most, I had some issues with the 2021 “Mortal Kombat” movie, but there were still a lot of good moments in it and it was still far beyond better than that of “Mortal Kombat: Annihilation” which is infamously bad in a way that you can still watch it and laugh at how bad it is. But since my hometown didn’t provide a screening for it, I was genuinely worried that this sequel was heading in that abysmal direction. Thankfully, that was not the case. I dare say that this might be the best “Mortal Kombat” adaption to date.

I was highly fortunate to have missed a lot of the advertisements and trailers for this movie. When it comes to movies like this, I tend to avoid the trailers if I can. Especially the Red Band trailers that tend to give away the best kills beforehand. Because of this, a lot of the movie was very fresh to me. I didn’t even get a chance to observe the movie poster to see all of the characters that were going to be in it. Needless to say, there were a lot of pleasant surprises for me when I sat down to watch this. The action sequences, while some having been heavily CGI’d, were bloody good fun and gory as hell.

A lot of the cast from the first film return for this one such as Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Mehcad Brooks as Jax Briggs, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, Lewis Tan as Cole Young, and of course we can’t forget Joe Taslim as Bi-Han and Hiroyuki Sanada as Hanzo Hasashi a.k.a. Scorpion. 

We also have some new players joining this round, such as Adeline Rudolph as Kitana, who was great in the movie. I thought she played the character very well. She definitely felt more like the main character of this movie. Moreso than another newcomer in this movie, Johnny Cage, played by Karl Urban. I thought he was great in this movie, too. He had a lot of funny moments throughout the movie that made me laugh, but those moments were outshined by Kano, played again by Josh Lawson, who cracked me up in every single scene that he was in. But big bad that was only shown in stone in the first movie, Shao Kahn, played by Martyn Ford, was a force to be reckoned with. He had such a menacing presence to him in every single frame. He’s basically the Thanos of this universe. I was really hoping that they would get this character right, and I feel as though they did.

I did get to see this movie in IMAX, and while I can say that the IMAX footage is impressive, it is very inconsistent. Some scenes were filmed for IMAX, which means that occasionally, the aspect ratio will shift to present a bigger image on screen. While I do enjoy this format when done right or strategically, this did not feel like there was any real purpose or strategy here. Sometimes you might get a single shot of IMAX footage within a scene, or a scene will literally open up into an IMAX shot only for it to just revert back to the original aspect ratio for the rest of the scene. It felt a lot like IMAX footage button mashing. But I can’t fault the movie itself for that. It’s just something that I noticed and wanted to address.

Overall, “Mortal Kombat” fans are sure to love “Mortal Kombat II”. If you were skeptical about this one potentially being worse than the previous movie, you can rest assured that this one is a lot better than that one. It expanded and corrected a lot of problems that the first movie had and managed to make it enjoyable and fun throughout the movie’s runtime. It is best to watch the first movie before going into this one as this one does surprisingly maintain a lot of the continuity of the first

movie. It’s not a perfect movie, far from a flawless victory, but it was still a lot of fun which is what “Mortal Kombat” is supposed to be. Because when the adaptation of the source material is faithful and fun, then both the audience and the studios win. The only question now is can “Mortal Kombat II” win the fight at the box office against its opponent Billie Eilish? I guess we will soon find out.

4 stars