The phrase “accuracy slop” does a wonderful job briefly articulating the insecure fan-servicing that risk-averse studio executives are increasingly hiding behind. Mortal Kombat II looks and sounds quite a bit like its video game source material. So what?

A more existential question may be “Is there a way to make a faithful adaptation of this source material that is itself a good movie?” Maybe? Probably? All that is certain is that writer Jeremy Slater and director Simon McQuoid are likely to have made button-mashing-fight-game enthusiasts of a certain age happy. But Mortal Kombat II is not a movie.

I have had this complaint before. As we continue to poison the livers of our creativity with the toxic swill of AI and whittle away our storytelling to match our attention span erosion, I am concerned that this is what will increasingly pass as a film. The best description here is that Mortal Kombat II feels like a sequence of edited clips referencing a movie. This is like how there are endless podcasts, Twitch streams, and YouTube videos recapping narrative works that are themselves the same length and often much longer than the works being recapped.

The lack of a plot is unsurprising: Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) is called upon by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to join a team composed of Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), and others. They are forced to fight against bad guys, led by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), in a fighting “tournament” to determine who controls “Earth Realm,” which seems like an unnecessarily long way of saying “earth.”

Other fan favorites pop up, like Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) and Kano (Josh Lawson), who was the previous film’s only real standout. They all fight. The fighting is mediocre. It seems impossible that this would take two hours, but it does.

Johnny’s arc is incomprehensible. He is an actor but also was a fighter but is now washed up and can’t fight. Except he maybe can fight, if he just believes in himself. Everyone else has powers but him. Except maybe he does have powers, if he just believes in himself. Urban targets the right tone for success but is left to fend for himself in that regard.

Every time the production seems to grasp that it needs to be a clever, cheeky bit of R-rated brutality it devolves into repetitive conversations that aren’t actually about anything. It’s not even exposition. It’s just…noise. Maybe in attempt to cover shoddy CGI, it feels like the whole thing is out of focus. It evokes scenes from the original arcade experience but more like a memory of them.

Describing the experience as hallucinatory makes it sound more fun than it was. On a purely functional level, the action simply isn’t satisfying enough, the humor simply isn’t rowdy enough, and the story simply isn’t. It just isn’t.

It worries me less that this exists and worries me more that, as of this writing, it is being fairly well received. This isn’t a “critic vs average movie goer” concern. Had it been violently gross in a fun way, I had two thumbs ready to go skyward for it. It’s just gibberish. It is evocative of a movie. It resembles a movie. It is shaped like a movie. It just isn’t a movie. And I’m terrified that maybe it’s the future of movies.

Grade = D-

Other Critical Voices to Consider

Joe Lipsett at Queer.Horror.Movies. says “Despite clunky storytelling, acting and direction, however, Mortal Kombat 2 remains a fun time, particularly if you’re a fan of the games.”

Maria Lattila at Film Stories says “The most frustrating thing is that this could have so easily been a pretty decent adaptation. The few times Mortal Kombat II works, it really works. Urban brings much-needed energy and laughs to the film, and there’s actually some life to be found.”

Kristy Puchko at Mashable says “Warner Bros hired a commercial director to make his feature directorial film debut with Mortal Kombat, and now he’s back with a muddled vision that’s an ugly and lifeless slog. But if fans go to the theater or stream this exhaustively on HBO Max, like they presumably did its predecessor, then the bar is in hell, and it won’t be raised.”