“I'm warning you. I got a Saturn Award for Best Fight in a Feature Film, so don't mess with me.”

Alright, so I should probably preface this review by saying that I am a huge Mortal Kombat fan. I only became a fan a year or so ago, but it has honestly become the only video game franchise that I still consistently play. Now, I don’t know any of the super deep lore, but I do definitely know enough to grasp most of it and be able to tell not only if this is a good movie, but whether or not it actually adapts the source material well. Mortal Kombat from 2021 is definitely a movie that I would say I like a lot more than most people, but my main issue with it was that it felt like the creative team behind it was saving all of their best ideas for its sequel, especially the tournament. So, now that it’s out, well, you already know that I really liked it based on my score, but here are my in-depth thoughts.

First, just to put it bluntly, this was exactly the adaptation that I’ve been hoping it would be ever since I became a fan of this IP. This definitely isn’t high-brow cinema by any sense of the imagination, but in my opinion, it exceeds in spades at being a Mortal Kombat live action feature film. You can very clearly tell that the people behind these two most recent theatrical releases very much looked into the criticisms of the first film in order to make this sequel as much of an improvement as they could, and yeah, a pretty significant improvement it was (I was unbelievably close to giving it an eight instead of a seven out of ten). This movie definitely doesn’t go above and beyond what it needs to, but now that they’ve figured it out, I’m pretty optimistic that the already confirmed third entry is going to be even better than this.

The first thing that Mortal Kombat II easily improves upon is its lore and world. For being a fighting game franchise, Mortal Kombat surprisingly has a pretty in-depth and fairly complex lore surrounding it, but I think this movie does a really good job at condensing it down enough for newcomers or people unfamiliar, while still delivering a really good experience for the fans. It also opens some doors to different things that can be further explored in the future, the two main ones to me being sort of the past and history behind the tournament and realms, as well as even the Tarkarn species, the species that Baraka belongs to. They also really nailed the locations and visuals here. There are significantly more than there were in the first film, and they catch your eye, look convincing, and capture the atmosphere of the games perfectly. There are several different places where people fight over the course of the movie, many of which are directly pulled from the games.

One thing that I still think most people would agree was done well with 2021’s Mortal Kombat was the action. It did a really good job at translating the video game experience to a cinematic form, without going too far into ridiculous territory. However, there definitely weren’t enough fights or action in that movie, at least what you would expect from a movie titled “Mortal Kombat.” For people disappointed with that aspect of the predecessor (like me), let’s just say that you don’t have to worry about that at all for Mortal Kombat II. There are a plethora of action scenes sprinkled throughout that deliver quite literally everything you would want from this sort of experience. There is obviously a huge cast of characters, but everyone gets their time to shine and show off their unique powerset, which I loved. It’s also extremely gory like before, but again, we get to see more of that sort of stuff with this sequel.

Then there is Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. I really can’t even begin to tell you how perfect he was in this role in my opinion. He stole literally every bit of screen time that he had and was easily my favorite part of the entire movie. What’s crazy about this is that Johnny Cage isn’t even a character I really liked all that much beforehand. I was never really all that enamored with him in the other movies including the surprisingly good animated ones, let alone the games, but here he is absolutely fantastic. His character has so much charisma, and also delivers some of the best laughs throughout. He also gets somewhat of a bromance with another character later on that easily could have been dumb, but surprisingly worked for me.

The other characters are really good, too. I’ll talk about Kitana later on (she was still good, don’t worry), but I’ll talk about all of the other major characters here. There are a few new people as well as returning faces, and I really liked pretty much all of them. Jax and Sonya are just as cool as ever, the big bad Shao Kahn is a surprisingly awesome villain (even though there isn’t a lot of depth to him), and Liu Kang especially has a bit of a smaller character arc that made him a lot more compelling. While I say all of that, there are still so many characters that you can really only take the time to focus on a few of them, but that is pretty much inevitable because of the vast roster of characters from the games, so I don’t think it would be fair to put that in the negatives. Even for non-Mortal Kombat lovers, everyone is still really interesting on their own to be entertaining, even if some lack depth. There is also a major death that takes place that, well, saying got me emotional would definitely be extremely excessive, but I definitely cared when it happened.

The mixed is probably what you already expected it was going to be, and that is the story. It is much better than the one from 2021, but it’s still not anything to write home about. It has a very fun adventure feel to it, but also attempts a Kitana storyline that I thought could have been done a bit better. It starts off really compelling, and I really liked Kitana as a character, but her storyline is supposed to serve as the emotional core of the movie, and it gets pretty much sidelined until the very end, which I found a bit disappointing. That being said, it still actually gives you a story to get invested in unlike other recent video game adaptations like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and especially Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, so I still give props to the writers for that. It’s not just an easter egg hunt designed only for fans of the franchise.

Really, the only big criticism I have of this movie is that there are really big stakes surrounding the plot that have to do with the fate of the world and stuff, but unfortunately, I didn’t really ever feel those stakes. In the first act, Johnny Cage, of course, is brought into this world of Mortal Kombat, where Raiden tells him that it’s for the fate of his world, but that’s really all you pretty much get from that. This definitely isn’t a major gripe because it’s still an extremely entertaining movie, but I think it would have been even better if you felt this impending sense of doom and tension throughout.

But as of now, I think this is the best Mortal Kombat movie, and easily the best of the live-action ones. I have a really hard time seeing die hard or casual fans or even newcomers not getting a kick out of this, and am eager to check it out again. I also hope that there isn’t a five year gap again between movies for the third one. Mortal Kombat II was a very pleasant surprise for me, for sure.