It was enjoyable. I'd say it was a good movie. The thing is it will just depend on what kind of Mortal Kombat fan you are. If you're one that just likes the over the top zaniness and enjoys piling characters in no matter the costs, then I think you'll love this movie.

Pros:

-Sub-Zero and Scorpion are both well represented here; the utterly evil nature of Bi-Han is well captured and Scorpion's humanity is displayed pretty well, despite the short amount of time we actually get to see him.

-Unlike most I thought the acting was in general pretty good. None of the performances stuck out as "bad" from the main cast. Liu Kang felt a little flat but he was barely in the movie to really judge.

-Kano was awesome. I didn't think it could be done but this guy actually outdid the original performance by Trevor Goddard, all of which created the Kano character we know today basically (he wasn't Australian until Goddard made the role his own). Witty banter with anyone he interacted with, the star of any scene he was in really.

-I actually ended up thinking the main character was okay. I was a bit worried about this particularly coming in, but I ended up liking him well enough and I appreciate his powers not being a ripoff of someone else from the MK canon. It was also a good callback to his character arc of being a punching bag for others.

-The fights were choreographed pretty well and all the effects used looked great, especially stuff like Liu Kang's dragon fatality and all of Sub-Zero ice effects.

Cons:

-"Character overload syndrome", which plagued MK Annihilation and was one of the many, many reasons it was awful. Obviously this film is not awful by any stretch, but I fail to see the need for characters like Reiko and Nitara here. Yes, they are cute little things for fans of the series given they're more niche, but the problem with this is like I mentioned. I personally am the type of fan that's into the lore and backstory aspect of the series, which is easier to do in a video game because there's more time and you don't need action beats and fatalities every 5 minutes. I really thought those characters were just wasted and their use served no one. The casual person isn't going to care or know about characters that haven't been in any games for well over a decade and the hardcore fan that would be excited to see these characters in action again will be disappointed when they have no speaking lines and die in 5 minutes. I'd have just preferred nameless goons or original characters; they created Cole specifically for the film, so just create some bit characters to kill off as fodder. Don't do this to actual MK lore characters.

-Some of the characters were poorly used. The biggest example is Goro. Here's your 9 time champion and he's literally sent after a guy who doesn't have any powers yet to kill his wife and kid. This just isn't befitting of Goro if you've played the games. To have this guy lose to Cole, who just found out he could use magical powers 3 minutes ago, is pretty lame.

-While it's difficult to write a proper ending to a Mortal Kombat... anything, because WB always is ready to start production on the next thing, this ending felt especially rushed to me and if there is no sequel, then "welp".

There's more to rant about, positive and negative, but those are my main thoughts coming out of it. Ultimately I was fairly impressed with it considering I was dreading this a bit as it became clear it was going to actually happen. I liked it more than I thought I might and I still think if they want to build a franchise of films around this, it could still work if they clean up some of the problems I had with it. Keep the cast small, or just do cameos that don't involve throwing an established character at a main character only for them to have no lines and die. All these characters have a story and if you can't tell those stories, don't use them.
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Truly smilin'

Mortal Kombat (2021)

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