Mortal Kombat! (1995)
Coming at ya!
Welcome to the very first entry in Video Game Month, the seventh of 12 theme months y’all voted for in my epic 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin project, which is currently in its second year of egregious failure.
I figured I would kick things off with a movie about a video game near and dear to my soul that I have inexplicably never seen, perhaps because I was subconsciously waiting for an opportunity like this.
There are some things that will always get my blood pumping and adrenaline flowing. The opening chords of “She Shook Me All Night Long.” The synthesizer assault of “Dare To Be Stupid.” “Hey Ya” in its entirety. Pretty much anything from The Chronic.
And I will always, until my dying day, experience an incredible surge of nostalgic excitement and exhilaration when someone yells “Mortal Kombat!” against a sick electronic beat in “Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)”, The Immortals’ iconic theme song for Mortal Kombat.
It’s the sound of my adolescence, a magical number that just plain makes me happy.
I am a milquetoast soul but hearing the anthemic throb of “Techno Explosion” makes me want to punch a superhuman alien monster in the face and feel the satisfying crunch of bone against my blood-stained fist.
“Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)” inspires blood lust and animalistic abandon. That’s only fitting considering Mortal Kombat was notorious for its gruesome, graphic, horror movie level violence.
It’s a game infamous for its “fatalities”, for blood-thirsty catchphrases like “Finish Him!” And “Flawless Victory” and for inspiring the Entertainment Software Rating Board with its stomach-churning, spine-snapping, blood-gushing over-the-top violence.
Mortal Kombat was a game that made parents sit up and saying, “Holy shit, my kid is playing that? No wonder he’s a psycho!” Mortal Kombat wasn’t violent the way other fighting games were violent: it was violent the way Itchy and Scratchy are violent, where it’s so impossibly lurid and extreme as to be parodic and satirical.
As a game Mortal Kombat is giddily, gloriously gruesome, a blood-spurting, neck-snapping celebration of gore and brutality but the 1995 feature film adaptation had to convey the barbaric, parent-enraging essence of its inspiration and still score a family-friendly PG-13 rating.
Luckily for the filmmakers, we live in a society where you can show humans fighting and killing monsters from outer space for ninety straight minutes and still get away with a PG-13 but if you show two gay men holding hands you’re slapped with an NC-17.
The trailer for the upcoming Mortal Kombat reboot has folks excited with its R-rated violence but the 1995 film from Paul W.S Anderson (credited as Paul Anderson because Paul Thomas Anderson would not release Hard Eight until 1996) managed to be pretty damn violent in its own right, if never as violent as the game.
Mortal Kombat begins perfectly: with “Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)” getting audiences into the perfect frame of mind to watch disappointingly bland heroes square off against martial arts adept monsters in an all-out battle for inter-galactic domination.
The film takes place in a fantasy world where Earth is threatened by a sinister realm known as Outworld. If Outworld wins a fighting tournament known as Mortal Kombat ten consecutive times then it will be able to conquer Earth.
To keep that from happening, Raiden, the snowy-maned God of Thunder (Christopher Lambert, having the time of his life lustily devouring scenery as a sort of bootleg, arcade game version of Obi-Wan Kenobi) assembles a trio of earth heroes who are skilled fighters but leave something to be desired in the personality and charisma department.
At one point Mortal Kombat was conceived as a video game vehicle for Jean Claude Van Damme. That ended up not happening. A coked-up Muscles from Brussels famously ended up starring in Street Fighter instead but those embryonic beginnings eventually led to the character of Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby).
Like Van Damme, Cage is a pretty boy Hollywood movie star whose bona fides are doubted by a skeptical public and martial arts community that has a hard time believing that someone so damn pretty could also be a world class martial artist.
Mortal Kombat would have benefitted from a big personality like Van Damme in the role. Then again, Van Damme was in Street Fighter, which pales in comparison to Mortal Kombat even with a trio of relatively bland protagonists.
Cameron Diaz was originally cast as badass Sonya Blade but had to drop out due to a wrist injury and was replaced by the comparatively colorless Bridgette Wilson, best known for playing Adam Sandler’s elementary school teacher and love interest in Billy Madison.
Battle-ready Shaolin Monk Liu Kang (Robin Shou) rounds out the trio of underwhelming heroes. If Mortal Kombat’s good guys and girls are overwhelmingly stiffs it boasts a rogue’s gallery of villains as imaginative as they are brilliantly designed.
The most impressive of these is underworld Prince and reigning champion of Mortal Kombat Goro, a four-armed half-man, half-dragon.
If Mortal Kombat had been made a few years later Goro would be a hazy blob of CGI but the filmmakers instead spent a million dollars on an impressive animatronic suit and puppeteers and got the great Kevin Michael Richardson to provide his voice and soul.
I was already enjoying Mortal Kombat when, in their big match, Johnny Cage starts things off by straight up punching Goro in the dick. It was at that point that I started wondering if I was watching not just one of the most entertains video game movies ever made but also quite possibly the greatest motion picture of all time.
Does Citizen Kane have a four-armed monster fighter from outer space getting cock-punched? I don’t think so. Does The Godfather featuring testicular damage to a multi-armed creature from another dimension? It does not. Does Rules of the Game prominently feature a four-armed warrior getting hit square in the family jewels? No. On Mortal Kombat features inter-species cock-punching. That alone gets it into the conversation for greatest film of all time.
One of Raiden’s endearing traits involves laughing inappropriately at random times, not unlike Dr. Hibbert on The Simpsons. So it’s weirdly perfect that one of those times is when his protege clobbers Goro in the nutsack, and Richardson, who coincidentally just took over as the new voice of Dr. Hibbert, cries out in pain.
Goro is joined by A-list villains like Scorpion and Reptile, both of whom are controlled by Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), an evil sorcerer who takes the souls of the warriors who are defeated in Mortal Kombat and acquires their powers in the process.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Lambert are locked in an all-out war to see who can over-act the most egregiously and entertainingly. It’s hard to match the overpowering cheesiness of Lambert’s glorious turn as Raiden but Tagawa is more than up to the task.
It is Tagawa that gets to deliver the words “Finish him!” and while it would be nice if they did some stunt casting and got Marlon Brando to show up for one day just to recite those two blessed words Tagawa deserves the honor by virtue of a performance of great quality and quantity.
All I want from video game movies is passable, coherent action and the characters, themes, motifs and general crazy-ass shit from the iconic arcade smashes that inspire them. That shouldn’t be too difficult. In fact it should be pretty damn easy. Yet that nevertheless is beyond the reach of seemingly 95 percent of video game movies.
Not Mortal Kombat! It gave me exactly what I wanted as a nostalgia-crazed forty four year old Gen-Xer in the year 2021. In hindsight I’m glad that I waited twenty-five years to avail myself of this glorious cheese because its 1995ness, particularly in terms of its music and early, adorably primitive CGI, is a huge part of what I love about it, and I really do love this ridiculous motion picture.
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