“Mortal Kombat II” opens with an ultraviolent duel — the movie is one fight scene after another after another — in which King Jerrod (Desmond Chiam), the leader of Edenia who’s 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’s a horned metal skull. (He wields a spiked version of Thor’s hammer, swinging it like an executioner’s ax.) Shao Kahn will be the film’s reigning badass monster, who tries to defeat 10 warriors from Earthrealm, all so that he can claim dominion over the other realms.
That opening fight is stately and somber, even as it culminates in King Jerrod getting his fingers lopped off — a preview of all the blood-spurting carnage the movie has in store for us. (It’s the gory icing on the action cake.) Shao Kahn’s reward for his victory is taking Kitana (Sophia Xu), King Jerrod’s 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’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” we’re presented with a scene from “Uncaged Fury,” a schlock thriller featuring Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a bone-busting action star in Ray-Bans and sideburns and a glorified Members Only jacket, with George Michael’s frosted hair and an attitude that’s less Chuck Norris than Colin Jost’s Pete Hegseth.
Johnny, unlike most of the characters in “Mortal Kombat II,” has no magical fighting abilities — he’s just a martial-arts champion who went Hollywood and is now a washed-up ’90s relic. But he’s 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’s “Rebel Moon.” “Forgive me if I don’t sign up to get mulched,” says Johnny. But he’s not going to have much choice in the matter. It’s Johnny’s destiny to join the latest motley crew of good guys, in this case the super-one-dimensional version.
For a while, we’re cheered at the prospect that Karl Urban might lighten the movie’s load with his meta ironic balsa-wood Don Johnson presence. And he does — a bit. But “Mortal Kombat II,” a sequel to the 2021 “Mortal Kombat” 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 “Mortal Kombat” film (there have been four), the fight’s the thing, though there are plenty of primal elements to gussy up the fighting — fire shooting out of people’s hands and mouths, electric volts that look like they came out of Frankenstein’s lab, a sense that the fighters can bounce back from death blows. Some of this is fun, though there’s 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’s all rather blurry.
Many of the one-note characters from the last “Mortal Kombat” movie, like Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), have returned. Apart from Johnny, though, the central dynamo in “Mortal Kombat II” is Kitana, played as a grown-up by the Hong Kong-born British actor Adeline Rudolph, 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’s 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 — a hat that spins like a table saw (we get to see someone’s torso fall on top of it), and Kitana’s twin fan blades, which do delirious damage at the climax.
And there’s 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’s most diverting fight sequence, he faces off against Johnny and is awed by Johnny’s skill. The setting of the Underrealm — a tiered inferno — allows the movie, late in the game, to establish the monosyllabic version of a “Star Wars” vibe. Yet it’s only a vibe. In “Mortal Kombat II,” the kombat hits the mark, but ultimately with minor force.