VGMRP: MORTAL KOMBAT

We start the VGMRP with, arguably, the creative apex of video game movies: MORTAL KOMBAT.

After a bitchingly rad credit sequence involving flames and techno, our hero, Liu Kang, receives a telegram (!) that reads as follows:

LIU KANG

BROTHER DEAD. RETURN HOME.

GRANDFATHER

And that's all you need to know about Liu Kang, Bruce Lee stand in. We next meet Sonja Blade in the same kind of club that Blade frequents; namely, the rave where even a shotgun blast doesn't stop the party. She wants the guy who killed her partner, aka Token White Female Cop. Then we meet Johnny Cage on a set of a crappy action movie that, uncannily, resembles most of the crappy JCVD and Steven Segal action movies of the 90's. He's out to prove he's no fake, aka the ironic white action hero.

This is all the intro the game needed to these characters, and the same proves true for the movie. There is a kind of beautiful, stupid simplicity to a film that can introduce it's three protagnonists, all of their motivations, a villain threatening to destroy the world AND Christopher Lambert as a god of thunder in about ten minutes.

Oh my yes, Christopher Lambert. "You have been chosen to defend the fate of your planet in a tournament called Mortal Kombat!" and cackles like a crazy man, or like an actor paid thousands of dollars to goof around as the 'god of thunder.' It works either way.

But I'm being too glib. By sticking with archetypes and simple motivations (revenge, revenge, desire to prove oneself, desire to be Christopher Labert), we get who our heroes are and why they are there. Everything else is a collection of colorful villany and chop-socky.

The game wasn't complicated: two badass ninja/kung fu/aliens/monsters/gods/women fight to the tune of techno until one of them is defeated. Given the often dire history of video game movies, the praiseworthy thing is not that this movie got it right, but that it DIDN'T SCREW IT UP.

Overall, the movie is a sometimes uneasy mix of good and bad. For every deliciously hammy Christopher Lambert moment, you get Robin Shou trying to be the next Bruce Lee and failing. For every kind of awesome set and fight scene, you get a preposterous mid 90's CG effect that takes you right out of the movie (Reptile, I'm looking at you here.) For every fantastic villain death (Scorpion gets lit on fire, then his head gets split in half and then he explodes) there is a crappy villain death (Sub-Zero has a bucket of water thrown at him and he turn into an ice cube) And check out the Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-ManInRubberSuit they got to play 'Goro',

I AM A GIANT MUPPET

What tips the scales in the direction of awesome is the performance of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung. This man was born to shout FINISH HIM, and he does. With great frequency. He also says FATALITY, FLAWLESS VICTORY, YOUR SOUL IS MINE and, my personal favorite, after Raiden says "Look, it has begun!" he screams IT HAS BEGUN. I could listen to this man read the phone book, as long as he was shouting it in a super intense voice.

Another great moment is when he promises "a taste of things to come", which involves a bunch of extras disrupting a banquet dinner in order to clear a path for Sub Zero to freeze some guy for no reason.

Multiple times during the 100 minutes, techno blares and ninjas fight each other in competent-but-not-mind-blowing PG-13 kung fu. And this is what it should be, it's what we came for. And by using the cg budget fleetingly and focusing more on two overgrown martial artists fighting in slow motion, the feeling you get when some guy totally gets his ass kicked in a somewhat credible way is not cringing, but is in fact satisfaction.

Of course, that assumes that what you WANT to watch is a bunch of kung fu fight set to techno, with a villain screaming FINISH HIM! But for the fans of Mortal Kombat, the game, that IS exactly what they wanted to watch. Yeah, some of the dramatic dialogue stinks ("Don't you dare do this to protect me, Johnny Cage!") but the over-the-top dialogue is fantastic ("Princess Kitana? The Emperor's Daughter?! She's over 10,000 years old!")

In other words, this star rating is not so much because it's a good movie (it's not) or even a great kung fu movie (it's not.) The movie works because, for once, damn it all, they didn't screw it up. I remember walking out of the theater as a kid, shouting "That was AWESOME!" My inner 14 year old still agrees. It may be trash, but it's good trash.

RATING: * * * (out of 5)

P.S. The director, Paul "W.S." Anderson, has made some movies that could charitably be called "God awful." They include Resident Evil, Soldier, and Alien vs. Preditor. Only two of his movies are worth a damn... namely, this one and Event Horizon. However, praise where praise is due... his action sequences are clear, easy to follow, have nice pacing and satisfying pay-offs. That he went onto make the incoherent (both visually and script wise) Resident Evil is a wonder.

P.P.S. The fan service still makes me smile, whether it's Scorpion shouting GET OVER HERE or Johnny Cage inexplicably having an autographed photo ready to throw down on an enemy's corpse. It didn't make any sense in the game, but it's awesome, and it belongs here.

I AM STILL AWESOME DESPITE BEING INTRODUCED IN THE EARLY 90'S