Mortal Kombat II Does 1 Important Thing That Most Video Game Movies Don’t

Mortal Kombat II has been one of the biggest hits of the month, with fans praising the new film in the long-running franchise based on the fighting game series. The newest film is getting a ton of praise over its predecessor. Unlike the 2021 film, Mortal Kombat II does a few important things that the original film and other video game movies do not, and it worked out for the better.

When 2021’s Mortal Kombat came out, fans enjoyed it, but not as much as they likely wanted to. Instead of looking to fully adapt any one game, the 2021 movie does what other video game movies do. That is, they try to tell their own version of the game’s story and shoehorn in as many characters and Easter eggs as possible to make it close enough. This never works out well.

Mortal Kombat II sticks to the cheesy, over-the-top style of the games and it works

This time around, though, Mortal Kombat II has corrected its course. The movie makes a large number of changes to the overall story of the movies. Namely, it strips away all of the original stuff added to the first movie.

Cole Young, the protagonist of the 2021 movie, is still present for a bit, but has largely been removed as the driving point of the story. Gone also is the movie’s weird “Arcana” subplot, which attempted to explain why fighters on Earth have the ability to develop powers. As writer Jeremy Slater told IGN, Arcana ended up becoming their own version of midichlorians, and was something they quickly wanted to ditch.

The movie also did what the first was seemingly afraid to do: embrace the chaos and cheesiness of its source material. The Mortal Kombat games are built on a wild story and feature some truly over-the-top characters, fights, and moments as a whole. The 2021 movie briefly showcased this, but was much more of a “standard” movie with some simple one-liners related to the games.

Mortal Kombat II, though, fully leans into the absurdity of the games, and for the better. The movie features a ton of awesome fights, moves and fatalities straight from the game, and even some nifty camerawork that mirrors the fighting game screen fans are used to seeing. Instead of simply using the source material as a launching pad for its own story, Mortal Kombat II embraces it and delivers a significantly better movie for it, such that it now has fans looking forward to the third entry in the series.

Source: Comingsoon.net