Mortal Kombat (1995)

Mortal Kombat (1995)

 

Starring: Robin Shou, Linden Ashby, Bridgette Wilson, Christopher Lambert, Talisa Soto, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Chris Casamassa, François Petit, Keith Cooke
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Action Director: Pat E. Johnson, Robin Shou

 

It’s a long-running joke that video game adaptations are almost guarateed to suck. It all started with Super Mario Bros., in which the writers decided that transforming the material into a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque sci-fi movie set in an alternate universe where reptiles evolved into people was the right approach. That was followed by the lamentable Double Dragon, which toned down the martial arts in favor of scenes like Alyssa Milano with an ugly haircut feeding spinach to Abobo. Right. Then there was Street Fighter, which ditched the martial arts tournament angle in favor of what was essentially a parody of 80s action movies.

There have been some successful movies. Nobody expected the Resident Evil movies to make it to six theatrical releases, but it did. Quality-wise, well, yeah. A lot of people enjoyed the Silent Hill film. The more recent releases of Sonic the Hedgehog and its sequel also showed that you could place video game characters in the “real” world and have a reasonably entertaining outcome. That said, the first successful—financially and with fans—video game movie was Mortal Kombat.

It came out during the summer of 1995. I recall taping a making-of documentary of the film off of TNT a few weeks or so before its release. I was rather excited about the project, although for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to make it to opening weekend. I eventually saw with my brother—who had seen it during its first few days in the theater—when it reached the dollar theater in Stockton. I had a lot of fun with it and eventually bought myself a copy on VHS because, let’s be honest, no martial arts movie fan in the 90s could do without one.

The movie begins with a young Chinese kid named Liu Chan (Steven Ho, Donatello in the second and third Ninja Turtles movies) taking on the powerful sorcerer Shang Tsung. He loses the fight, at which point Shang Tsung looks into the camera and declares that he’ll still Chan’s soul…and then “you’re next.” It turns out to be a dream that Liu Kang (Robin Shou, of Death Cage and Tiger Cage 2) had, shortly after the notification of his brother’s death. Apparently, Chan had been training to take part in the Mortal Kombat tournament after Liu Kang chickened out and went to live in America. But now that Chan’s dead, Liu Kang blames himself and wants to enter the tournament for revenge.

At the same time, we meet our other main protagonists. One of them is Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby, of “Teen Wolf” and “Melrose Place”), a martial arts actor of the Van Damme variety. Cage has been dogged by the press in recent months, with tabloids accusing him of being a fake when it comes to the fighting. A visit from his old sensei—actually Shang Tsung in disguise--convinces him to join the tournament.

Finally, there’s CIA (?) agent Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson, Billy Madison and House on Haunted Hill) who’s in Hong Kong looking for a master criminal named Kano who’d murdered her partner. When we meet her, she and her current partner, Jax, are infiltrating an underground, multi-ethnic metal rave…do those exist in Hong Kong? Anyway, she learns that Kano is hanging out at the port, exactly where the ship that will transport the participants of Mortal Kombat is due to arrive.

Once on the ship, our three heroes meet both Shang Tsung and the God of Thunder, Raiden (Christopher Lambert, of Beowulf and Highlander: Endgame). Raiden then explains the game: every generation—how long is that?—there is a martial arts tournament between the best fighters of the Earth realm and another realm known as Outworld. If a realm loses ten consecutive tournaments, the portals open and allow for the winner to invade and conquer the other. The current leader of the Outworld, Emperor Shao Khan, wants to conquer Earth and has already won nine tournaments. If Earth loses this one, it’s doomed. Only the combined skills of Liu Kang, Johny Cage and Sonya—with some assistance from Raiden and Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto, of License to Kill and Vampirella)—can save the world!

Mortal Kombat is little more than an FX-heavy retread of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Martial arts tournament on an island? Check. Chinese martial artist as a hero? Check. White guy who’s not a real martial artist playing second fiddle? Check. Final battle between Chinese hero and Asian tournament organizer? Check. Pat Johnson helping with the action? Check. That said, it is almost ironic that critics universally dimissed this film as nothing but a collection of fight scenes, while praising Enter the Dragon for the same reason. For example, let’s take Leonard Maltin: 

ETD: “Almost perfect Kung Fu film that forgets about plot and concentrates on mind boggling fight scenes.”

MK: “Elaborate special effects and impressive set design are helpless against weak story, uneven akting, and komikally thin karakters…Mostly just one fight after another…”

Obviously, the special effects have not aged well at all (28 years later), but really, were the characters in Enter the Dragon all that deep? And if a thin story was acceptable for Enter the Dragon, why not for Mortal Kombat? And Enter the Dragon didn’t have the interesting costumes and art design that this film had. It’s not fair, I tell ya’! That said, the dialog is very cheesy and recalls 90s action-adventure cartoons. I mean, it isn’t quite as cringe-worthy as your typical episode of the Power Rangers (or either of the 90s films), but it is very stilted.

But the action! What about the action?

For the most part, the action is still pretty solid. Robin Shou steals the film as Liu Kang, giving us the flashiest moves and best fight: Liu Kang vs. Reptile (Keith Cooke, of China O’ Brien and Heatseeker). Shou himself choreographed it, bringing with him almost a decade’s worth of Hong Kong film experience. Cooke was a fellow wushu stylist and the two were perfectly matched punch for punch, kick for kick—the fight also has an awesome theme song. He does some of Donnie Yen’s trademark kicks, like the jumping back kick and jumping double back-kick, during the climatic fight with the souls of the warriors defeated by Shang Tsung.

Shou also choreographed the big fight between Linden Ashby (and his stunt double, J.J. Perry) and Scorpion (Chris Casamassa, who reprised the role on the “Mortal Kombat” TV series). According to the aforementioned documentary, the script called for Cage to dodge Scorpion’s alien-worm-rope-dart weapon, only to defeat him with a single shadow kick. Boring. So, Scorpion transports him to this other world that was patterned off of SE Asian burial platforms and the two go at it, Hong Kong style. It also ends of the film’s most violent fatality.

The other fights are decent. Bridgette Wilson as Sonya Blade isn’t the most convincing screen fighter: my 14-year-old daughter has seen a few Jackie Chan movies under my tutelage and even she thought that Wilson couldn’t sell herself as being tough enough to take down Kano. Thankfully, that’s her only real fight. The lion’s share of the action goes to Robin Shou, who obviously knows what he’s doing. However, I do have to fault cinematographer John R. Leonetti for placing the camera too close to the combatants during some of the fights; that has always been a Hollywood limitation for filming martial arts and it detracts from the physicality of the performers.

By the time Mortal Kombat came out, there were already three MK games in existence (although MK3 had come out in 1995). Paul Anderson and his team wisely kept the story focused around the first game, with only the inclusion of Kitana (and a brief cameo by Shao Khan in the final shot) harking back to the Mortal Kombat 2. That also meant that the villains in general were able to have their own introductions before their fights with the main characters. Compare with Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, which was trying to throw in so many characters from games 2 and 3 that characters would randomly appear for a fight scene and then disappear from the narrative.

Another reason that Mortal Kombat was so successful was that it respected the source material. I mentioned the questionable changes that its predecessors made to the games’ lore. But let’s compare this to Street Fighter, which had come out about six months before. Street Fighter was treated like a send-up of the sort of action movie that Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Chuck Norris made the year before. It did get the characters’ costumes right, but the story had little to do with anything SF-related. And it was scared to do the powers thing: Byron Mann’s Ryu does a hadouken that is just a blink-and-you-miss-it flash of blue light. Damian Chapa’s Ken does a shoryuken against Vega that doesn’t leave the ground. Stupid.

Mortal Kombat more or less embraces the more fantastical aspects of its characters powers. Liu Kang does his fireball and his bicycle kick, which is a wire-assisted Wong Fei-Hung no-shadow kick—a lá Once Upon a Time in China 2—in all its glory. Shang Tsung steals souls and transforms into other people. Sub-Zero has his ice attacks. Although Sonya doesn’t have her sonic blasts, she at least does her leg throw. Goro is Goro: a four-armed giant who is almost impossible for human fighters to defeat. Scorpion reveals his face to be a fire-breathing skull. It’s all there. Viewers in 1995 wanted to see their favorite MK characters looking like their video game counterparts, doing good martial arts and their favorite moves. They got just that.

Heck, the film’s willingness to embrace the powers-approach to fighting was referenced a few years later when The Storm Riders came out. A lot of my Asian friends told me about the film, describing the film as a Chinese version of Mortal Kombat. I saw a number of internet reviews at thet time comparing The Storm Riders to Mortal Kombat because of the costumes, set design and use of martial arts “powers.” They never compared anything to Van Damme’s Street Fighter now, did they?