Mortal Kombat

Directed by Simon McQuoid, Mortal Kombat follows several fighters, including Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage and Josh Lawson’s Kano, as they’re forced to battle one another in an epic tournament. Filmmaker McQuoid, armed with a script by Jeremy Slater, delivers a perpetually uninvolving (and generally interminable) misfire that boasts distressingly little in the way of context or character development, which, given that the episodic narrative essentially consists of one tiresome fight after another, ultimately does ensure that the 116 minute (!) running time often feels just about endless – with the relentlessly uninvolving atmosphere, as a result, rendering the picture’s few bright spots, including (and especially) fun, tongue-in-cheek work from both Urban and Lawson, moot. And while the movie admittedly does contain a very small handful of engaging sequences (eg Johnny Cage’s encounter and battle with a monstrous creature named Baraka), Mortal Kombat is, by and large, a hopelessly tedious video-game-adaptation that seems unlikely to even win over fans of the original interactive series.

*1/2 out of ****