7 / 10
Official trailer
Mortal Kombat is the rare video game adaptation that understood what it was. Paul W. S. Anderson directed in what amounted to a launching pad for his later career in genre cinema. Robin Shou plays Liu Kang. Linden Ashby plays Johnny Cage. Bridgette Wilson plays Sonya Blade. Christopher Lambert plays Lord Rayden. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa plays Shang Tsung. Talisa Soto plays Princess Kitana. The plot is a tournament. Earthrealm has lost ten consecutive Mortal Kombat tournaments to Outworld. Losing one more will allow Outworld to invade and conquer Earthrealm.
Three Earth fighters have been recruited to participate. The film is what happens next.
Mortal Kombat is a blast for me, more fun than a 1995 video game adaptation has any right to be. It knows it’s a tournament movie with a thunder god and a techno soundtrack, and it plays that straight. My reservation is the PG-13 rating, which leaves the film with no fatalities and a slightly defanged feel.
The film made approximately one hundred and twenty-three million dollars worldwide on an eighteen million dollar budget. It was the highest-grossing video game adaptation up to that point and helped establish the template for the genre’s mediocre commercial success and consistent critical dismissal that would define video game movies for the next twenty-five years.
What Works
The film commits to the source material. The plot is the plot of the games. The characters are the characters of the games. The fatalities are largely absent because Paul W. S. Anderson and the producers correctly determined that an R-rated Mortal Kombat film would have made less money than a PG-13 one. The film’s PG-13 violence is the major creative compromise but the compromise is the only reason the film exists in releasable form.
Christopher Lambert as Lord Rayden is the film’s best performance. Lambert had been a star since Highlander (1986), and his Rayden is a thunder god with the weariness of an immortal who has been doing this job for a long time. The performance is small and quiet, the closest thing the film has to a moral center, and I think it’s what keeps the enterprise from floating away. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung is the second-best performance. He plays the villain as a man enjoying himself, and I enjoy him right back.
For Writers
A film based on existing intellectual property succeeds when the writers respect what the audience came for. Mortal Kombat fans wanted to see Liu Kang fight Shang Tsung in a tournament. The film delivered exactly this. The script doesn’t try to expand the universe in ways the source didn’t establish. The lesson is that adaptation requires understanding what the audience is buying. If your readers loved a specific thing in the source material, deliver that thing. Innovation in adaptation should serve the existing material.
The Choreography
The fight choreography is the film’s main selling point.
Robin Shou had been a Hong Kong action film veteran before this production. The film borrows the visual grammar of Hong Kong action cinema and applies it to a Western fantasy structure. The fights are long, varied, and shot in long takes that let the audience see the choreography instead of fragmenting it through fast cuts.
The Liu Kang versus Reptile sequence is the choreographic high point. The Liu Kang versus Shang Tsung climax is the dramatic high point. Both fights respect the audience’s intelligence enough to show what’s happening instead of hiding the choreography behind editing tricks.
The Reptile fight is the one I’d show anybody who thinks this movie is just nostalgia. Shou and Cooke move at full speed, the camera stays back and lets them work, and it still looks better than most American fight scenes from that decade.
For Writers
Action sequences benefit from being shown instead of implied. Mortal Kombat shoots its fights in long takes that let the audience follow the moves. Most American action cinema of the period was cutting fights into incomprehensible flurries. The lesson is that audience confusion is rarely an asset. If you’ve done the work of staging an action sequence well, show the work. Hiding choreography behind editing suggests the choreography wasn’t strong enough to survive being seen.
The Soundtrack
The techno soundtrack is the third reason the film worked. The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)” is the film’s signature track and became a widely recognized piece of mid-90s electronic music. The score by George S. Clinton supports the techno elements instead of competing with them. The combination of synth-heavy electronic music with martial arts action created a 1995 energy that the film captured at exactly the right moment.
That theme is my favorite thing in the film. The second that “MORTAL KOMBAT” shout hits I’m grinning, and the movie knows exactly how much energy it gets from the music. The soundtrack was also a major commercial success on its own merits. The album sold over two million copies in the United States. The music drove the film’s marketing in ways that the film’s plot or cast couldn’t. The “MORTAL KOMBAT” vocal sting became one of the more recognized audio brands of the decade.
For Writers
A musical identity can become as important to a property as the characters or plot. Mortal Kombat 1995 is remembered partly for its theme song. The film and the song reinforce each other across thirty years of cultural memory. The lesson is that the audio identity of your work is part of the work. If you’re producing in a medium where you control the sound, treat the sound as a primary creative element. The strongest properties usually have distinctive audio signatures.
Craft Note
The Liu Kang vs. Reptile fight is the film’s strongest action choreography. Robin Shou and stunt-performer Keith Cooke work through a sequence that balances arcade-game move recreation with workable cinematic action. The fight shows that video game adaptation can preserve source material identity when the production commits to performers who can execute the physical vocabulary the source games established.
Is Mortal Kombat worth watching?
7/10. For me this is the best mainstream video game adaptation of the 1990s. Lambert and Tagawa are doing real work, the choreography is competent, and the soundtrack still gets my blood moving. The PG-13 rating is what holds it at a 7, since the film pulls its punches where a Mortal Kombat movie should land them. The 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is much worse, and so is the 2021 reboot. Watch the original.
