Mortal Kombat does not actually happen in the film Mortal Kombat

No this isn't me being a nitpicky nerd, it's a pretty serious problem when the stakes of the film are decided by Mortal Kombat, the stakes are basically the only motivations driving the main characters, and most of the movie is setup for the tournament

In reality, the film is the story of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, which is fine but Scorpion also doesn't show up until right at the end

It's not even really Cole's story either. Like, the fight with Sub-Zero doesn't REALLY mean anything to him, even though his family is kidnapped Cole doesn't have a relationship to Sub-Zero at all.

That's why Hanzo ends up giving the final blow, because he DOES have a relationship with Sub-Zero, if Cole did it, it would be meaningless

I am really just kind of dumbfounded how superfluous the first 50 minutes of this movie are, that's like half the movie

Also except for Sub-Zero, and maybe Shang Tsung? None of the villains are characters in any meaningful sense of the word

Oh Kano, he's a character

But Mileena just shows up, doesn't kill anyone, and gets fucking axed just to show off Sonya Blade's new power

And while Sub-Zero is sort of a character, he doesn't have a meaningful relationship to any of the characters who are actually around in the movie

Jax's arc feels like a student driver stalling their car. He actually has more of a motivation to fight Sub-Zero than Cole does but then that goes out the window so we can give him the cool arms, and then he beats up the hammer dude because he called dibs

I guess Sonya Blade has an arc where she starts as the Morpheus then gets to be one of the chosen ones, but also what even is her motivation? We never get a sense of who she is or why she's so obsessed with Mortal Kombat (don't say she wants to save the world, that's a cheat)

Liu Kang gets absolutely fucked in the arc department, mfs been training his whole life for this tournament that doesn't happen and then his bro gets killed and he doesn't even get revenge

I'm still just gobsmacked that they didn't just start 50 minutes into the movie, that's literally the first time we learn anything worthwhile about the characters

Also Raiden fucking sucks, jesus fuck, He sits around doing nothing and then this group of people who went out and found him show up to fight and he's like "no you're useless, fuck you." BITCH WHY DIDN'T YOU GATHER THEM YOURSELF

He has that whole "can't interfere" line but of course Shang Tsung flaunts that rule and then he shows up at the end to do nothing and he's just like "lol fuck rules"

The thing is you could start the movie at the end and have Johnny Cage be your POV and actually get to the tournament

People complain about the MCU always leaving cliffhangers for the next thing, but at least those movies have some fucking closure

Honestly what this reminds me most of is Fant4stic, that's another movie that attempts to wrangle it's source material into a 3 act structure but completely leaves out one of the acts so all you're left with is Joseph Campbell backwash and meaningless choices

The best fight in the film is easily the first Sub-Zero/Scorpion fight which is kind of damning because that's the one big fight that's mostly divorced from the powers, which are ostensibly the main draw of the movie

The other fights aren't bad, but they're generally not very interesting and mostly meaningless punch-ups between strangers

The action is fine, but again, it means nothing because none of the characters have any relationship with the people their fighting. Hell even Sonya Blade and Kano don't have much other than the fact that Kano taunted her early on for not having powers

This film is a great example of why "oh just get rid of the shaky cam!" isn't going to actually fix bad action. There's no storytelling in the fights and there's no chemistry between the fighters or even an interesting motivation for them to fight

Sonya really does confound me, like she starts off as the MK Morpheus but then half way through the movie we find out she is (was?????) a soldier and that also doesn't matter outside of one line with Jax establishing a connection in the first time they have a one on one scene

Just the entire conflicts between the characters aren't even established until 40 minutes in and that's just . . . a catastrophic error

The movie really does spend a mind-boggling amount of time establishing the importance of the prophecy (always with the fucking prophecies) and the tournament, and then neither of those things actually matter for this movie

The worst part is that the importance of both of those things is fairly well established by the opening titles, they don't need to have Sonya do the Ancient Mortal Kombatants routine to tell us the backstory of the tournament

It sucks because I like Lewis Tan, and I don't HATE Cole, he just suffers the most from the writing because he doesn't have a history in the games to fall back on

Like literally every character is about as Chosen One as he is but with him it's most notable because I never pulled my hair out trying to projectile spam Shao Kahn while playing as Cole Young

I liked when he punched the ice to get his family out, it was very Jojo

Although that's another problem, at the end of the day, Cole's big motivation is to save his family, but we don't know them at all because we spend all this time being told how important it is to win Mortal Kombat and how to develop your projectiles and shit

And then he doesn't even rescue his family!!!!!! Scorpion does!!!!!!!!!!!! Cole literally gets nothing to do, even though most of the movie hinges on him

The low-point happens when he leaves the temple, he's our POV character in the first act, and the kidnapping of his family begins the third act. Every single significant plot beat centers on him and he never gets to choose anything that affects the outcome of the movie

That's the real problem with Cole, it's not that he has Protagonist Syndrome, it's that he has very little character outside of Protagonist and he doesn't even get to be the Protagonist

Fuck I just remembered that fucking Goro was in this thing for like two seconds lmao

It's a decent choice to make Scorpion v Sub-Zero the dramatic backbone of the film, but when one of those characters doesn't show up until the very end, that means the rest of the movie is nothing