In June of 2025, nearly a full year ago, Mortal Kombat II screenwriter Jeremy Slater declared that during test screenings for the movie, viewers reacted the way he reacted to Avengers: Endgame. “They were cheering and jumping out of their seats,” he stated. “Every joke is landing and they are loving it… That’s why you get into this business.”
This quote is fascinating for a litany of reasons, not least of all the fact that a full year ago, this long-gestating sequel had apparently already been done for “a while” before getting delayed yet again to its actual release date of now. But perhaps the most telling element of this quote is the insight it offers into the creative process that yielded the result that is Mortal Kombat II.
After a prior film which performed well enough but got a largely lukewarm reception from ardent fans of the gaming franchise, from the very outset, it seems as if the team behind this sequel aspired to deliver the Avengers: Endgame of Mortal Kombat films. And allow me to assure you, dear reader; that is painfully apparent in the most egregious of ways from the very start of the film.
Don’t waste your time on Mortal Kombat II
Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat II is not a film. It’s not a movie. Instead, watching Mortal Kombat II feels like watching a supercut some fan has uploaded of a bunch of disparate, disconnected cut scenes from a Mortal Kombat game. It’s malnourished, misshapen, inconsistent, unfocused, and feels distinctly like you’re constantly missing key bits of information or context.
While that might sound like a pretty distinct criticism of the film (and it certainly is in my eyes), I don’t think that the creative team behind the team feels the same way. In fact, they seem to wear this fact like a badge of honor, as evidenced both by that quote and the general vibe of the film itself. This is a sequel that gets all that pesky movie stuff that fans didn’t like last time around (like “story,” “character development,” “themes,” or “motivations”) out of the way and gets to what it assumes audiences really showed up for: buckets and buckets of gratuitous fan service and slavish pandering.
Maybe the best way to understand this integral and fatal flaw at the core of Mortal Kombat II is to examine its story structure, or lack thereof.
The film opens on a flashback that establishes Shao Kahn as the primary antagonist, and Kitana as its protagonist. This prologue sees Shao Kahn murder Kitana’s father and take over her realm, leaving her doomed to serve as his soldier. The film then cuts ahead, 20 years later, to the present day to tell the story of… Johnny Cage. If that feels like a non sequitur, it’s because it is. After spending the first part of the film setting Kitana up as its main character, Cage suddenly becomes the film’s focal point, with the entire fate of the story actually resting on his shoulders.
A more focused film might’ve proven able to make this work; there’s plenty of great films that feature more than one sole protagonist. But Mortal Kombat II is distinctly not up to the task, as beyond these two characters, the film also wants to be an ensemble picture without ever putting in any of the work to establish its ensemble of characters.
There are entire swaths of this film where both Kitana and Johnny Cage might as well disappear from existence entirely, as the film haphazardly shifts focus to one of the side characters that the film has done literally nothing to establish in any kind of meaningful way. This hysterically means that each and every one of these side-story sequences has to start with the characters just spouting decades worth of in-game lore at the audience in some of the worst exposition you’re likely to see in a theater this decade.
Between these being nothing characters in terms of the larger story, the hard-to-swallow exposition, and the sheer lack of motivation beyond obligation for any of these scenes, they bring any and all momentum the film has screeching to halt.
Also, because so much of the runtime (especially the second act) is comprised of these tangential showdowns, it leaves the film with next-to-no time to deliver with the purported arcs it is clearly attempting to execute for Kitana and Cage. When your primary characters are absent from most of the middle of the film, either metaphorically or literally, it makes any culminations in the third act feel completely unearned, because neither the audience nor the film was able to engage with these characters across the scope of their journey.
For all intents and purposes, this reduces an arc like Cage’s to a point-A to point-B situation; he feels disillusioned and then he doesn’t. There’s no progression to him as a character, he just suddenly puts his sunglasses on and is all better. Not only does the movie clearly not view this as a drawback to its portrayal of Cage as a character or its overall cinematic structure, it’s so proud of this sunglasses moment that they literally do it twice within a ten minute span of the movie.
But to assume the movie’s apparent point of view; who cares about the story or the characters, right? You come to Mortal Kombat II for the action, do you not? Well, while you certainly won’t go hungry looking for action throughout the film, none of it is particularly compelling.
Part of this stems back to aforementioned issues, like character, theme, and motivation all being completely lacking from these action setpieces. Emotion is a key ingredient to great action, and Mortal Kombat II is utterly devoid of it. But even just on the barest of surface levels, the action in Mortal Kombat II is frequently lackluster. The direction is often strangely weightless and lacking any sense of impact, the staging frequently feels stilted, and the editing is full of completely disorienting choices that fudge the clarity and legibility of what is actually happening.
On top of this, it is all just becomes so monotonous after a while. I spent the first 30 minutes of the film at least thinking that it had a certain I’m-sure-this-will-kill-at-sleepovers-for-years-to-come charm, but the film becomes so utterly bloated and repetitive quickly after that that it made me regret daring to have any positive thoughts about this film.
By the time the film reaches its third act, its just become an unyielding parade of different people walking through different portals to shoot different lasers at one another while saying their respective catchphrases, all while the film practically flashes a “please clap” sign for the audience.
The performers do what they can here. The one moment of the film that did actually elicit a smile from me was early on, during Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage introduction, where he makes a fun little Big Trouble in Little China reference. Adeline Rudolph shows potential as Kitana, but the film never gives her any room to really shine.
Altogether, Mortal Kombat II dreams of being Avengers: Endgame in the same way that Joker dreams of being Taxi Driver; it seeks to ape the aesthetics of its inspiration and longs to generate a similar response from its audience, but it wants to do that without putting any of actual work in to figure out why its inspiration functioned in the first place.
A dull, repetitive film that I can’t imagine being anything but grating, even for longtime fans of the series who have anything more than an ounce of self-respect.
GRADE: D
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