Pretty big spoilers here…the film’s been out for 20 years now.

On the surface, Mortal Kombat is not a good film. If you weren’t a fan of the series, you found this to be junk with cool music. But if you were a fan…well…wow. The value of Mortal Kombat lies in what the film is trying to be. It’s not trying to win an Oscar Award. It’s trying to be a film adaptation of the Mortal Kombat video game series. And it’s not a bad one either.

Mortal Kombat has to get some extra credit because of where video game film adaptations were. The Super Mario Bros. Movie  was a disaster. Street Fighter came out a year before Mortal Kombat and was just as bad as Mario Bros. Fans needed something that resembled the games they played on their TVs…or more specifically in this case…the arcade.

More or less, Mortal Kombat gives it to them. The film mostly takes the story of the Mortal Kombat I game with some references to MKII. The fate of the world is decided in Mortal Kombat, a fighting tournament where two people fight until one is dead. Earth’s best warriors (Liu Kang, Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage) must defend Earth against the warriors of Outworld (led by Shang Tsung). Outworld must win ten Mortal Kombats in a row to overtake Earthrealm. They have won nine. Along the way, Earth’s heroes meet supernatural beings, both friend and foe, as they learn about themselves and find the strength to win Mortal Kombat and save the Earth. Yeah, the story is pretty bare bones, but that’s the point. The story of Mortal Kombat isn’t supposed to be complicated.

We do get all of the iconic Mortal Kombat characters in the film. While some are done justice for sure (say what you want about Christopher Lambert’s Raiden and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Shang Tsung being overplayed, they both worked brilliantly, especially Tsung. Tagawa was so good he was asked to reprise Tsung in the series Mortal Kombat Legacy in 2013), others aren’t fleshed out at all (Sub-Zero, at one time perhaps the iconic character of Mortal Kombat, has one pretty cool moment and then gets beat down by Raiden and Liu Kang everywhere else). Our heroes range from okay (Robin Shou’s Liu Kang) to insufferable (Johnny Cage), although Bridgette Wilson as Sonya works out well (her character takes a lame turn as a damsel in distress though). I will give a bonus to a small twist in Liu Kang’s character. Kang is pretty much the boring primary protagonist in the games (so much that the game series eventually switched focus to Scorpion as it’s featured fighter, with good results), but here he’s sarcastic and is even skeptical of the Mortal Kombat tournament overall. There’s a scene when he just dumps Cage’s luggage in the river which got a good laugh from me.  Our villains are pretty good overall, especially Tsung and Scorpion (who puts up a much better and cooler fight against Cage than Sub-Zero does against Kang). Goro’s defeat is pretty embarrassing for the character though, but with special effects at the time I’m not sure what else could be done. Bonus points for Reptile’s fight against Liu Kang, which was an iconic moment for my 8 year old self and works really well now. Kano is a bit wasted but serves his purpose, and his Australian accent was used for future games. Princess Kitana is utterly forgettable, and Art Flores just serves as an example to get beat by Goro.

The effects are surprisingly not awful, and even some are pretty cool (Cage’s Shadow Kick and even Goro himself). There’s a few times where it doesn’t work (Tsung’s castle looked terrible) but all in all they didn’t try anything crazy and as a result didn’t do anything terrible and did a few things good.

It’s worth pointing out that this may be the greatest soundtrack for any film ever. No, that’s not an exaggeration at all.

Mortal Kombat gets one big minus though, which is that it was rated PG-13. I get why it was, but considering that the game series was not only the most violent video game series of all time at that point but also led the video games being rated, the film loses some luster for a lack of a R rating. There’s not even one drop of blood! It’s Mortal freakin’ Kombat!

Nonetheless, if you told my older self that this was the film adaptation of Mortal Kombat considering all factors (other video game films, no blood, PG-13) and this was the result, I would have called it a damn miracle.

Pros:

+Most of your favorite Mortal Kombat characters are there.

+Incredible soundtrack.

+Follows the story of the games well.

+Some iconic fights (Cags vs. Scorpion, Reptile vs. Liu Kang)

+Some iconic performances

Cons:

-For non-MK fans, this film had nothing going for it.

-Johnny Cage is insufferable.

-Some iconic characters were wasted.

Grade: B