Mortal Kombat II

Remember the start of "Galaxy Quest" (1999) when a group of actors are drafted in to help rescue the universe from a nasty megalomaniac bent on intergalactic domination? Well, this time it's poor old "Johnny Cage" (Karl Urban) who's the past his sell-by-date Thespian reluctantly recruited by "Lord Raiden" (Tadanobu Asano) to help save the Earth realm from certain doom. He is to join four other somewhat sceptical fighters, all with various skills, to combat the five soldiers of "Shao Kahn" (Martyn Ford) who has been hitherto indestructable as the princess "Kitana" (Adeline Rudolph) can attest having seen her father slain when her own kingdom fell. Now adopted and trained by this nemesis, and together with her formidable friend "Jade" (Tati Gabrielle), she looks certain to reduce "Johnny" and his cohort to dust. Things become even more doom-laden when an all-powerful amulet is accidentally delivered by Aussie rogue "Kano" (Josh Lawson) into the hands of the khan and getting this sorted out is going to take them all to the perilous netherworld for quite a battle royal. Now this is really quite a good fun action adventure if you take it on face value, and it is certainly no worse than than the first of these Simon McQuoid outings from five years ago, but the dialogue is pretty torrid and even though he looks like his tongue is fixed firmly in his cheek, Urban just hasn't the charisma to pull this off and so he does really rather let this down. That said, along the way there are plenty of homages to other films in this genre; the visual effects are pretty spectactular and there are loads of perfectly choreographed and acrobatically staged combat scenes that are straight out of "Kung Fu Panda" to keep us entertained as the plot heads in a fairly predicable direction. Not great, no - but it passes two hours easily enough.

On first watch of the trailer, I expected that Johnny Cage would be the centerpiece, capitalizing on Karl Urban's name. While the usual formulaic approach and a bit of convoluted and disjointed script, it did pay homage to the previous film (though not the video game). I did appreciate that they gave mostly equal balance to the different characters, though it lacked backstories to everyone but Cage. We expect the acting to be fun and not deep (except for Cage), which we expected. The special effects were decent, though a few things could have been better. I like the choice of actors, though Urban is a bit too old for the role; instead of many being young and inexperienced, they went with an older, more seasoned cast which gave the characters more weight. Only the Johnny Cage gave notice to the advanced age. Liu Kang's fire special effects were really overdone, but the rest of the movie was not drowning in special effects. Overall, it was a decent film, with a thin plot, okay acting, but a generally fun time. As for the negative, I would say the disjointed script that didn't really refresh any previous plot points was a bit confusing and took away from the experience. Highlights: I liked the choice of an older cast instead of a bunch of 20-somethings that didn't add gravitas to the characters. Lowlights: A couple of SFX misses, confusing subplots, and no resolution for Cage's special abilities. Acting: 5/10 Special FX: 5/10 Writing: 3/10 Directing/Cinematography: 7/10 Editing: 6/10 Overall Entertainment: 6/10