Mortal Kombat II
Mortal Kombat II (2026) is the sequel to the 2021 reboot of the Mortal Kombat movie franchise. Based on a long-running video game series known for its over-the-top violence, the franchise was first adapted to film in 1995, then halted by a disastrous sequel released in 1998. In the intervening 20+ years, the video game franchise remained popular, making the reboot series greatly anticipated.
This sequel picks up where the reboot left off and revolves around a tournament to the death between Earthrealm and Outworld, a mystical vaguely ancient alternate dimension filled with monsters and powerful beings under the control of a tyrannical emperor, Shao Kahn. At stake in this tournament, the control of earth.
I was 13 when Mortal Kombat (1995) was released in theaters. Already a fan of the video game series, I was beyond ecstatic to see the movie. While an imperfect film, the original Mortal Kombat is a perfect distillation of what I would have wanted to see in a video game movie at that time. I greatly anticipated the release of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) and to this day, I still remember it as one of the most disappointing movie theater experiences of my life. So, I have been intrigued by this reboot of the series. I found Mortal Kombat (2021) to be a fairly flawed film, but felt there was enough there to move the series forward to hopefully better sequels.
The Cast
This movie introduces two new characters to the reboot series as co-leads, Adeline Rudolph as Kitana and Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. By comparing these two performances we can see the movie’s main flaw fully exposed, the script is terrible. It is full of clunky exposition heavy dialogue supporting a by the numbers plot. The more experienced actors in the cast are able to work past the script’s deficiencies, while the less experienced performers are left without the support a good script would provide.
Rudolph gives a passable if somewhat generic performance as Kitana. There is a revenge component to her story, Kitana is the daughter of the King Shao Kahn slays to complete his conquest of Outworld (this is depicted in the film’s opening). Like most of the performers in this movie, Rudolph struggles to make the clunky dialogue believable. The revenge plot forms the backbone of the story, though it is too predictable to be engaging.
As one of the more veteran actors in the film, Urban brings a lot more presence to the role of Johnny Cage. He brings some humor to his performance and also serves as the audience surrogate and as such is able to project skepticism towards the events of the movie. Surrounded by all the other characters who are grim faced and accepting of how their roles serve the plot, Cage feels like the only fully fleshed out character.
The rest of the cast of characters is a mixed bag. Josh Lawson as Kano stands out for his comedic moments. He is the only other character aside from Cage who gets to have a sense of humor. Hiroyuki Sanada returns as Scorpion and is excellent, as he is in everything he appears in, but does not have a lot of screen time. He basically shows up for the climax of the film. Chin Han as Shang Tsung, main villain of the first film, has absolutely nothing to do in this movie. This is too bad as I would argue Tsung is a much more interesting antagonist than this film’s villain, Shao Kahn. Depicted by Martyn Ford, Kahn is your standard all powerful despotic ruler. Darth Vader and The Emperor rolled up into one. Aside from wanting to rule over everything, there really isn’t much to this character in terms of motivations. As he wears his mask throughout the entire movie, Ford must rely entirely on his voice to get across the motivations of the character. It doesn’t work. Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, a god of thunder and lightning, who is leader of the Earthrealm fighters, is given the classic film trope of being in a coma for most of the film’s runtime. Another character who does not have much to do.
The last two characters I feel are worth mentioning here are Max Huang as Kung Lao and Ludi Lin as Liu Kang. Their stories are mostly deferred to the presumed next movie in the series, but they do have what I would consider to be the standout fight of the movie. Both in the quality of the martial arts skill on display, and in the incorporation of Kung Lao’s boomerang like razor-edged hat which provides an exciting ever present danger throughout the matchup. Aside from their fight, these characters are not given a lot of screen time. Kang in particular has a bizarre exit from the movie, presumably setting up a storyline for future films, but it feels unearned here, like a few story and character development steps were skipped in order to get to a place that future sequels can pick up on.
The Fights
The rest of the fights are not all that memorable, and that is perhaps the greatest condemnation of a movie about a martial arts tournament. There just wasn’t anything that really stood out to me as great here. But there were a few things that stood out to me as bad.
The fighting is where having Karl Urban play Johnny Cage showed some flaws. He’s just not believable as a martial artist. The film does try to address this with making the character older and some acknowledgment that Cage is an actor who used stunt doubles to stand in for his action scenes, but then the actual fight choreography in the movie does not follow up on that idea as the style of fighting used for Cage is quite athletic, incorporating a lot of flips and high kicks. Perhaps a more grounded style would have fit the character better. But at the same time, the movie makes mention that Cage was an accomplished tournament fighter prior to becoming an action star in the 1990’s. This is a direct allusion to Jean Claude Van Damme, who was famously the original inspiration for the Johnny Cage character. I think taking that idea, and merging it together with the limitations that come with casting an older non martial artist actor like Urban ultimately breaks the character.
Visually, the movie is decent. Very standard cinematography and editing, professional looking, but nothing that really stands out as worthy of mention. Costumes and set design all look very accurate to the video games.
The Bigger Picture
So where does that leave us? We now have two very flawed movies in this Mortal Kombat reboot series. I do wonder if the central conceit of Mortal Kombat being a tournament to the death might clash with having a multiple movie franchise with returning characters. In a video game, where plot and story are secondary to gameplay, a character respawning gets hand waved away as not something that needs to be thought about all too much. However, the addition of reincarnation as a plot device for bringing characters back in a movie removes most of the weight from the film’s story. If any character can die and come back, does anything that happens in these movies actually matter?