If the aim was to take a dump on the IP and alienate the existing fanbase, good job. If it was to turn people who never engaged with the franchise in any way before, probably even better.
Shame on whoever wrote this lazily put together nonsense that has nothing to do with any established storylines, nor manages to tell a sane, internally coherent story if we discount the first, and frankly main issue. I'd say this cliché riddled, phoned in pile of **** manages to find the perfect balance between facepalm and cringe, but no, somehow it breaks both of those scales at the same time.
The story starts at roughly the right place, though watching the Shirai Ryu get exterminated by the Lin Kuei feels sort of like Batman's or Spiderman's origin story: overtold. Then the unnecessary "main character" is shoehorned in, and you know what, I'd be borderline willing to step past that if he was not a character with no traits. I don't mean he's boring, or vanilla, I literally think that when the character was "developed" the writer(s) forgot to come up with a personality.
And let's not forget about this ridiculous "arcana" concept, that allows iconic characters to do what they do without their established gear or cybernetic implants, or in the most extreme case allow them to magically manifest high-tech cybernetic prostetics. The sheer level of laziness in the writing here is detestable.
Shame on the director too, who deserves the same kind of props, I never realized you could get performances out of otherwise talented actors that are stiff, over the top and boring at the same time. "Give me your best crotchity grandpa with kids on his lawn and dial it up to 12" must have been a sentence heard daily on set. And when the cast and crew were finally free of this "genius" and post production finally started, the sound team suddenly had to start putting up with the daily instruction: "Now put a sci-fi noise in for that magic event", while the editors had to work with this: "Okay, so we dirped hard on the fight coreography, so just chip-chop this scene into sub-second pieces so nobody notices that."
The dumb, campy 90'-ies Mortal Kombat was 12 times better than this lazily slapped together. The one good thing about this being so bad, is that the next reboot (however many decades we might need to wait for it) will have to be a home run. It's a simple recipe: get an iconic cast of characters together, get them to Shang Tsung's island by minute 20 and then do the tournament. Nail the fights, the characters, put in some appropriate character devlopment, a dash of humor and crank the epic to 11 at the end. A blind hamster could do it ;)
Shame on whoever wrote this lazily put together nonsense that has nothing to do with any established storylines, nor manages to tell a sane, internally coherent story if we discount the first, and frankly main issue. I'd say this cliché riddled, phoned in pile of **** manages to find the perfect balance between facepalm and cringe, but no, somehow it breaks both of those scales at the same time.
The story starts at roughly the right place, though watching the Shirai Ryu get exterminated by the Lin Kuei feels sort of like Batman's or Spiderman's origin story: overtold. Then the unnecessary "main character" is shoehorned in, and you know what, I'd be borderline willing to step past that if he was not a character with no traits. I don't mean he's boring, or vanilla, I literally think that when the character was "developed" the writer(s) forgot to come up with a personality.
And let's not forget about this ridiculous "arcana" concept, that allows iconic characters to do what they do without their established gear or cybernetic implants, or in the most extreme case allow them to magically manifest high-tech cybernetic prostetics. The sheer level of laziness in the writing here is detestable.
Shame on the director too, who deserves the same kind of props, I never realized you could get performances out of otherwise talented actors that are stiff, over the top and boring at the same time. "Give me your best crotchity grandpa with kids on his lawn and dial it up to 12" must have been a sentence heard daily on set. And when the cast and crew were finally free of this "genius" and post production finally started, the sound team suddenly had to start putting up with the daily instruction: "Now put a sci-fi noise in for that magic event", while the editors had to work with this: "Okay, so we dirped hard on the fight coreography, so just chip-chop this scene into sub-second pieces so nobody notices that."
The dumb, campy 90'-ies Mortal Kombat was 12 times better than this lazily slapped together. The one good thing about this being so bad, is that the next reboot (however many decades we might need to wait for it) will have to be a home run. It's a simple recipe: get an iconic cast of characters together, get them to Shang Tsung's island by minute 20 and then do the tournament. Nail the fights, the characters, put in some appropriate character devlopment, a dash of humor and crank the epic to 11 at the end. A blind hamster could do it ;)