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Video game movies: the type of movie which has as much chance at critical and commercial success as Nickelback. Nowadays there have been some movies based upon video games released which are considered to be decent, but when the first properties were transferred from the small screen to the big screen in the early 90s they all sucked so hard it would pull a golf ball through a garden hose. Yes, that was a Full Metal Jacket reference.
One of the movies that sucked the least was Mortal Kombat. That movie might not be great art, but it had a simple story-line, some nice fights and was at least faithful to the original premise of the game resulting in a two-star rating by me. Something you can hardly say about movies like Super Mario Bros or Street Fighter.
Too bad the sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, it right down there at the bottom of the barrel with them.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is simply put a terrible movie. The most surprising element being how detached it feels from its predecessor even though it’s a direct continuation of the previous movie and released only two years later. Yet, aside from Robin Shou, nobody from the original cast returns and they are replaced by people who do such a bad job at portraying these characters it makes Christopher Lambert’s performance as Rayden look Academy Award material. But the new additions are even worse than the recasted roles. Some of the performances are so bad they have become legendary like this scene:
Wow, just… wow.
It always surprises me how these people are cast for these roles. I can understand that when you make a movie with your friends, like Kevin Smith does, not every cast member is a trained actor, but a movie like this is a studio movie. Somewhere out there is a casting director who has cast her and the rest of these actors . I looked it up and some guys named Fern Champion and Mark Paladini are responsible for casting her. I took a look at their resumes and it seems they both do casting for a lot of TV-shows and low budget movies. Paladini was apparently responsible for casting David Hasselhoff in Nick Fury: Agent of Shield. Why do these guys even have a job if they suck so hard at it?
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation feels like a rejected Power Rangers episode. Every fight scene has people randomly doing flips followed by those poses where they move very martial-artistic. Like the Rangers did before they got in a fight with one of their opponents; it looks so goofy and can’t be taken seriously.
But let’s face it, that’s part of what makes a movie like this enjoyable.
This is one of those movies that is purely enjoyable due to how bad it actually is. It’s like watching coverage of a disaster on TV. You shouldn’t enjoy it, but it is so engaging you don’t turn it off. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is exactly like that: a disaster in every way, but you can’t simply look away. There is something strangely enjoyable about watching guys in rubber suits pretending to be metal robots doing back-flips and fighting each other.
The tagline on the poster says “destroy all expectations”. Never has there been a tagline more true to a movie.
