I've never been much of a video game player. I managed to make it through several demo levels of Doom, Heretic and Carmageddon with the cheat codes enabled (for me it's the equivalent of watching a foreign film with the subtitles on) and I used to enjoy aimlessly messing about in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City causing assorted vehicular destruction and randomly running over old ladies on the beach. But I'm not a gamer or a gamehead and I never put 50p in a martial arts arcade machine because I was only going to lose very quickly.
This is the third cinematic incarnation of the Mortal Kombat game to hit UK multiplex screens, and it's certainly the best so far, albeit against very weak competition. Neither the Paul WS Anderson film from 1995 nor the John R Leonetti "sequel" (Annihilation) two years later have been up for a rewatch in the last two decades as I didn't think they were more than passable. Every so often there's a massive fighting tournament between the evil Outworld and our own mortal Earthrealm; Outworld have won the last nine of these interdimensional thudathons and if they win this next one then they'll take over the Earth forever. (Whose rules are these?) Only a pitiful quartet of untrained humans can stop them, if they can discover their secret superpowers in time; meanwhile the Outworld team have decided to cheat by wiping out Earth's contenders before the tournament even starts...
The first thing to say about this new Mortal Kombat is that it's really violent and graphically gory in a way that had me wondering how the hell it went through the BBFC with a mere 15 certificate. Even acknowledging that it's all fantasy violence that can't be imitated or emulated by impressionable teenaged idiots without MMA training, it's surprising how much they've got away with. Today's splatter fans don't know they're born. In a highlight scene which in the 1980s would have been hacked out entirely and the remnants given an 18, a woman's head is bloodily bisected by a buzzsaw hat. Don't even ask; suffice to say that not all the granted superpowers are cool and one poor sod missed out on laser eyes and lightning bolts and ended up with a magic hat.
This does all sound like absolute kobblers. But it's very colourful and mostly moves so quickly that you don't really notice either the extensive running time (110 minutes) or that it doesn't make a whole load of sense. There's plenty of bone-crunching combat scenes, CGI monsters, a pleasingly diverse assortment of characters showing that women can fight just as hard and as brutally as the men, and even double amputees with robot arms can take down demented extradimensional demons. It's not magnificent enough to suggest a renaissance in videogame adaptations, but as a simple minded action movie in which people lamp each other Mortal Kombat 2021 is more than enough fun. Babbling nonsense, but I rather enjoyed it as a violent, empty spectacle. These days, I'll settle for that.
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