Mortal Kombat

Directed by Simon McQuoid, Mortal Kombat follows an assortment of characters, including Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, Jessica McNamee’s Sonya Blade, and Josh Lawson’s Kano, as they’re recruited to participate in the deadly title tournament. Filmmaker McQuoid, working from Greg Russo and Dave Callaham’s screenplay, does an admittedly effective job of infusing the early part of Mortal Kombat with a slick yet impressively watchable feel, which does, at the outset, ensure that the movie’s proliferation of underwhelming elements aren’t as intrusive as one might’ve feared. (The absence of fully-formed, non-generic protagonists, Lawson’s sarcastic Kano notwithstanding, remains a problem from start to finish, however.) It’s clear, then, that the picture’s grip on the viewer grows more and more tenuous as it progresses into an increasingly uninvolving, wheel-spinning midsection, and although this portion of the proceedings has been peppered with a small handful of compelling sequences (eg Cole takes on a fearsome four-armed opponent), Mortal Kombat, hindered by a ludicrously overlong running time, climaxes with a third act that’s hardly able to pack the engrossing, visceral punch for which McQuoid is obviously striving – thus cementing the film’s place as an almost tolerable video-game adaptation that wears out its welcome to a seriously distressing degree.

** out of ****

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