Mortal Kombat II

Remember the start of "Galaxy Quest" (1999) when a group of actors are drafted in to help rescue the universe from a nasty megalomaniac bent on intergalactic domination? Well, this time it's poor old "Johnny Cage" (Karl Urban) who's the past his sell-by-date Thespian reluctantly recruited by "Lord Raiden" (Tadanobu Asano) to help save the Earth realm from certain doom. He is to join four other som…

Unbearably, tooth-achingly bad. Now, you can only do so much with a plot of a computer game from the early 90s that has been filmed umpteen times already, but this is a new low. And a cleaned up, one-dimensional version of Butcher can't save it. Just no.

On first watch of the trailer, I expected that Johnny Cage would be the centerpiece, capitalizing on Karl Urban's name. While the usual formulaic approach and a bit of convoluted and disjointed script, it did pay homage to the previous film (though not the video game). I did appreciate that they gave mostly equal balance to the different characters, though it lacked backstories to everyone but Cag…

31 years later, Mortal Kombat (1995) is still the best movie in this franchise. The internet led me to believe that this was a better movie than the 2021 reboot, and it is, in some aspects, but it's still trash. What the !@#$! Why is the acting so bad? Why is the choreography so bad? Why is Shao Khan a !@#$%?! Am I really meant to believe this guy is a conqueror?! How? !@#$in' Cole You…