{"id":942650,"date":"2026-05-07T00:20:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T00:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/942650\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T00:20:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T00:20:20","slug":"mortal-kombat-ii-review-dependable-action-sludgy-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/942650\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Mortal Kombat II’ Review: Dependable Action, Sludgy Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cMortal Kombat II<\/a>\u201d opens with an ultraviolent duel \u2014 the movie is one fight scene after another after another \u2014 in which King Jerrod (Desmond Chiam), the leader of Edenia who\u2019s like a warrior from ancient times, faces off against Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), who looks like the Lord Humungus meets Darth Vader under a helmet that\u2019s a horned metal skull. (He wields a spiked version of Thor\u2019s hammer, swinging it like an executioner\u2019s ax.) Shao Kahn will be the film\u2019s reigning badass monster, who tries to defeat 10 warriors from Earthrealm, all so that he can claim dominion over the other realms.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat opening fight is stately and somber, even as it culminates in King Jerrod getting his fingers lopped off \u2014 a preview of all the blood-spurting carnage the movie has in store for us. (It\u2019s the gory icing on the action cake.) Shao Kahn\u2019s reward for his victory is taking Kitana (Sophia Xu), King Jerrod\u2019s young daughter, and raising her as his own. A bit later, though, the film cuts to the New Line Cinema logo, in grainy VHS, and cued to the soundtrack of Scorpions\u2019 \u201cRock You Like a Hurricane\u201d we\u2019re presented with a scene from \u201cUncaged Fury,\u201d a schlock thriller featuring Johnny Cage (Karl Urban<\/a>), a bone-busting action star in Ray-Bans and sideburns and a glorified Members Only jacket, with George Michael\u2019s frosted hair and an attitude that\u2019s less Chuck Norris than Colin Jost\u2019s Pete Hegseth.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohnny, unlike most of the characters in \u201cMortal Kombat II,\u201d has no magical fighting abilities \u2014 he\u2019s just a martial-arts champion who went Hollywood and is now a washed-up \u201990s relic. But he\u2019s tapped to become part of the squad of Earthrealm fighters, one of those all-for-one teams like the Avengers or the Justice League or the Fellowship of the Ring or the renegades of Zack Snyder\u2019s \u201cRebel Moon.\u201d \u201cForgive me if I don\u2019t sign up to get mulched,\u201d says Johnny. But he\u2019s not going to have much choice in the matter. It\u2019s Johnny\u2019s destiny to join the latest motley crew of good guys, in this case the super-one-dimensional version.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a while, we\u2019re cheered at the prospect that Karl Urban might lighten the movie\u2019s load with his meta ironic balsa-wood Don Johnson presence. And he does \u2014 a bit. But \u201cMortal Kombat II,\u201d a sequel to the 2021 \u201cMortal Kombat\u201d reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story. Here, as in every \u201cMortal Kombat\u201d film (there have been four), the fight\u2019s the thing, though there are plenty of primal elements to gussy up the fighting \u2014 fire shooting out of people\u2019s hands and mouths, electric volts that look like they came out of Frankenstein\u2019s lab, a sense that the fighters can bounce back from death blows. Some of this is fun, though there\u2019s a way that all the floating combat metaphysics ends up blanding out the stakes, or maybe just the rules. What, exactly, allows one fighter to triumph over another? It\u2019s all rather blurry.<\/p>\n

\n\tMany of the one-note characters from the last \u201cMortal Kombat\u201d movie, like Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), have returned. Apart from Johnny, though, the central dynamo in \u201cMortal Kombat II\u201d is Kitana, played as a grown-up by the Hong Kong-born British actor Adeline Rudolph<\/a>, who smashes this role with a finesse worthy of a KPop Demon Hunter. Kitana joins our heroes, secretly undermining her adoptive demon father Shao Kahn. There\u2019s an amulet (one of those glowing doohickeys the fate of the cosmos hangs on), and your heart may sink every time someone starts chattering about it. There are also a few viciously cool weapons \u2014 a hat that spins like a table saw (we get to see someone\u2019s torso fall on top of it), and Kitana\u2019s twin fan blades, which do delirious damage at the climax.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd there\u2019s a roster of colorful supporting freaks: Quan Chi (Damon Herriman), the sorcerer who skulks around like Darth Maul meets the ghost of Jacob Marley, Kano (Josh Lawson), the good-time Aussie sociopath, and Baraka (CJ Bloomfield), the clan leader with horror-film jaws. In the film\u2019s most diverting fight sequence, he faces off against Johnny and is awed by Johnny\u2019s skill. The setting of the Underrealm \u2014 a tiered inferno\u00a0\u2014 allows the movie, late in the game, to establish the monosyllabic version of a \u201cStar Wars\u201d vibe. Yet it\u2019s only a vibe. In \u201cMortal Kombat II,\u201d the kombat hits the mark, but ultimately with minor force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMortal Kombat II\u201d opens with an ultraviolent duel \u2014 the movie is one fight scene after another after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":942651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[263288,77,182071,143767,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-942650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-adeline-rudolph","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-karl-urban","11":"tag-mortal-kombat-ii","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116530435154102037","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/942651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}