Call Me By My Name: Mortal Kombat Is Not Mindless entertainment, It’s Just Mindless.

I don't know what to do, I don't know where I'm at. I feel at times like I'm in the Twilight Zone. I'm sitting in this this era, in this time where more in more it's becoming a regular refrain that when a movie is God-awful and terrible and clearly not even trying, it’s called fun, or mindless entertainment, as if bad movies don’t exist. It’s this idea that instead of witnessing a movie that sucks and is terrible we are watching a movie that is knowingly winking at me telling me "I know this aint sh** but we're having fun". Still others say that because the premise of movie is based in something inherently silly, then I'm supposed to give up on any form of story telling, forfeit the idea of character development, narrative coherency, common sense, amongst other things. Thing is I know what "winking" looks like, I've seen Joel Schumacher's Batman movies give a master class in it. Mortal Kombat is not that. It’s that viral video of the woman pouring tons of candy into a toilet bowl. It’s fatalities, and mediocre fights, on Nostalgia IP steroids. The feverish wet dream of execs who know all they need do is button mash certain criteria that meets with the ever lessening expectations of ravenous audiences who will eat up any version of their fave property on screen just so long as it’s faithful to the aesthetics of their love for it. I came into this movie expecting nothing but a good time. John Wick with Fatalities and Halloween costumes, hell even Hobbs and Shaw, but if I had a floor, in the words of Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction “N**** went through that".

The film started out promising enough. The first five minutes introduced quite possibly the two most popular characters from the long standing video game series; Scorpion ( The always great Hiroyuki Sanada) and Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim, one of the greatest on screen martial artist working today) in an opening salvo that gave you everything you could want: a dash of story, lots of gore, and blood, some bad lines, but with good acting, great choreography and a very solid set up. Then it all goes to hell, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a precipitous drop off in a movie. We are introduced to Cole Young ( Lewis Tan) a burned-out seemingly over the hill former MMA champion now fighting for 200 dollar backyardigan matches and mostly losing. We find out extremely quickly he is a chosen champion, why? Well because he has the tattoo and some bloodline stuff. Why is he losing so much, what has he lost, and truly how he can get it back is never really explored because this movie isn’t interested in like.. storytelling. It moves on…Fast. He meets Jackson Briggs “Jax" (Mehcad Brooks) who is special forces, that’s ’s pretty much it about Jax. Sub Zero shows up, Jax sends Cole to Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and she has Kano tied up. Very quickly Kano, (Josh Lawson) Sonya, and Cole become friends learn about this tournament that none of them are gonna be in, because it never happens (which is a plot point, but also is part of the reason the movie drags, with nothing to build to it sort of takes the inertia out of it) anywho, They train terribly, make even worse jokes, form nothing approaching chemistry, and Jax appears again, with his missing arms carterized by the cold, but no mention of his severe head injury from being slammed through concrete head first before a long drop. Jax then appears with arms, no announcement we just suddenly see them on…okay fine. Shang Tsung (Ng Chin Han) tries to pull a Termimator move and stop the fighters before their even “born"…again as fighters. This “born again" (which is what I’m calling it) involves finding their arcana which is found by getting your aas whooped, or knowing yourself, or becoming very very pissed off, or something. In order to kill off these pretty God awful fighters, (who feel like they belong in the Keanu Reeves starrer “The Replacements") Shang enters Raidens training temple, and does so like he’s got his own personal key, Raiden apparently had never thought of securing this place until this moment and when he does its completely indestructible UNLESS Kano shoots a laser at its PBC piping, and then it’s totally worthless. Now why anyone trust Kano in the first place, why Raiden or anyone never decides to keep an eye on the guy whose whole history as stated through lots of exposition screams “DON’T TRUST THIS GUY WHOSE ONLY HERE FOR MONEY!” Well that's just one of the many many many mysteries and nonsensical plot holes that litter this movie and I gues you're a bad guy if you bring it up. I’m reminded of this Simpsons episode “HOMR" where Homer Simpson is kicked out of a movie theater after calling out a movies predictability and overall stupidity.

I did not expect this movie to win awards, or even make a run at this year’s best action film, (though whats wrong with that?) I just wanted it to be coherent in between the cheese, fun in-between the stupidity, it wasn't. It was beyond lazy, it was insipid and dumb. I detest the whole idea that because of the genre or the property you're using being considered lower forms of art or entertainment that your not supposed to try and make a good movie, or more to the point tell a good story. You don’t have to make Gosford Park here. 1987's action classic”Predator” is about as silly as you can get when you get right down to it, and ut doesn’t create characters so much as draws us in with the superficial nature of character. Same could be said for all those marines in “Aliens”, The idea that all you have to do is simplify everything down to the basic property of give us what we want chafes at me because it implies giving us what we want and telling great stories are mutually exclusive. I’ve seen well done movies about Lego Batmen, and Oscar contenders about Wrestlers, not the Olympic kind mind you you can do both. To go back to the winking” element for a bit, for me that “wink" is a phenomenon that occurs either when the director fully recognizes that there is something silly to be explored here and honors that gleefully but not disrespectfully. They see depth in the absurdity of it and explore and mine it for all its got, thats not this, and if it isn’t apparent in the movie it is in writer Greg Russo's own words…

Nevermind the classic misinterpretation of camp ( as if its inherently bad and not a stylistic choice) it’s telling on what's really going on here, but if you’re still not convinced, how about this…

Almost every last one of those moments in the film feel exactly like the very thing Russo says he was trying not to do. This is not, Mortal Kombat is not knowingly tossing us a wink, it’s a glaring through us into the abyss of the abysmal. It doesn't have very many interesting characters, because it believes that's taking away from spinning hat tricks, it jumps from scene to scene and still drags, and maybe if its fight scenes were as legendary as the stuff we’ve seen in John Wick, or The Raid, “The Night Comes For Us" or even some Marvel movies, I might be inclined to give it some shred of dignity, but they weren’t bothered and I am incapable of lying about this film. This isn’t the loving, but lacking vision of an Ed Wood, or the happenstance at the intersection of awful and effort that is Michael Schultz's The Last Dragon, this is just plain awful, and sometimes it’s okay to just call it that rather than reflexively propping it up as the very thing those who made it were trying so hard to veer away from. Saying so emboldens not only the creators, but the green lighters and by God the industry is in enough trouble as it is.