Can We Have A Real “Mortal Kombat” Movie?

by Chris Vegvary

Remember the old days of arcade gaming (by which I now mean the 1990’s)? With games like Street Fighter and Tekken and other fighting games I have zero interest in, Mortal Kombat was a step in the right direction. It had the graphics, it had the controls, and it had the one thing that every other fighting game out there lacks: Fatalities. In Mortal Kombat, fatalities can be performed on the losing fighter by any character, so there were quite a variety of gory (and sometimes impossible and hilarious) death animations to play around with.

In 1995, Paul W.S. Anderson directed a film based on the game. Do you guys know of Paul W.S. Anderson? I’ll bet you do, if you think real hard. He directed the film Event Horizon (which I say is his only good film to date), 2002’s Resident Evil, the horrific Alien vs. Predator (by which I mean it sucked), and the remake of Death Race. Those of you who have played Mortal Kombat know that it’s not a game meant for children, even though children play it anyway. So why, OH WHY, did he take this idea for a movie based on Mortal Kombat and direct a PG-13 movie for us? None of the fatalities we’ve come to know and love from the game made it into the film, with the exception of Shang Tsung “sucking” someone’s soul out…in a very PG-13 way.

Sadly, the film was what it was, but then there was a sequel that came out in 1997 that added a whole slew of characters from the other games in the series, and it looked like it could be good. Unfortunately, that was also rated PG-13, and worse than that, they killed off my favorite character (Johnny Cage, yo) in the opening scene of the film. Sonya Blade, Rayden, Johnny Cage, and Jax were all played by different actors than in the previous film. The rest of the movie played out like a silly costume party where none of the props looked right, and it was just all-around bad. There, I said it.

In 2011, Mortal Kombat was reborn onto the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with awesome new graphics, controls, and fatalities. It felt like it was completely redone from the ground up. Very little of it resembled the original in terms of looks and style, and it was just excellent. Not to mention that downloadable characters were released after the game came out, one of them being the man himself…yep, Freddy Krueger was in a Mortal Kombat game, and his fatalities are the sh*t. Kevin Tancharoen directed a bunch of shorts based on his vision of what Mortal Kombat is, and since then, there’s been rumblings in Hollywood about a remake of the franchise in film form. While his version is a little too real for me, it is more geared towards an adult audience, and a Mortal Kombat movie with an R-rating that takes full advantage of what the whole thing is about would not be unwelcome.