Mortal Kombat II — Lenny Chen

On principle I should be against this movie because I hate hollywood IP mining that has no respect for the craft, but I actually didn’t have the worst time watching this. Partly because my expectations were genuinely on the floor, and partly because this movie doesn’t put on any pretenses, which in turn almost feels like some kind of respect to filmmaking?

It throws character development out of the window and does not even try to give Johnny Cage any nexus to change but he just does. It uses random flashback sequences liberally to drive completely foreseeable plot twists. All of this I find plainly hilarious and honestly pretty refreshing.

This was the right move, because This whole universe is so ridiculous that it would have backfired miserably if they had tried anything remotely serious. Instead, they just show hot people commit creative and gruesome violence against each other, which to no one’s surprise proves to be entertaining just by itself, exactly like the game. My only complaint was that Johnny Cage nut punch could have used a bit more of a kick.