Why Didn't This Suck? (Mortal Kombat)

Video games and Hollywood have a long, uncomfortable history together. My first memory of the two media combining is the Super Mario Bros. movie, a movie so bad that the fact that I watched it is the only thing I remember about it. Whenever a game-based movie is announced, the debate always seems to be on how much the movie will suck instead of how it could possibly be good. Failure is not only the norm for this genre, it’s expected. Rightly, too.

Street Fighter, for example, was so bad that after being given fifteen years to figure out what went wrong, an even worse Street Fighter movie was made.

Mortal Kombat stands as one of, if not the only, high points in the game-to-movie crossover department. And Mortal Kombat was by no means spectacular. The simple truth is that “Eh, it was a’ight” is the highest praise a video game movie can expect!

So why didn’t it suck? What made Mortal Kombat stand out?

This is as good a place as any to start. This bit of music is almost instantly recognizable (and really, the guy shouting “MORTAL KOMBAT!” should give it away,) and it was all done for the movie. Hard as it may be to believe, one of the hallmarks of the Mortal Kombat franchise never once appears in the games.

Does music make a good movie? Yes and no. I could probably do another entire blog about the music from Jaws, or Star Wars, or Jurassic Park, or a ton of other examples to talk about how music can set a tone for a movie, but no one is going to sit in a theater for two hours just to hear a few seconds of one specific song at a time. So no, this one song does not explain why the movie didn’t suck.

What does make a good movie is good actors. Mortal Kombat had two that left their mark: Trevor Goddard and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.

Who?

Trevor Goddard played the character Kano, a Japanese-American crime boss. Thing is, Trevor Goddard played him as an Australian.

And it stuck. The actor’s portrayal in the movie was so popular, the character was changed to reflect it (going so far to include a cry of CRIKEY! during a tutorial in one of the games). But he was still just one actor, and he played a bit part at that. Kano was in the movie for four scenes, two of which were about a minute or less of screen time. While that makes the fact Trevor Goddard was good enough to change the character more impressive, it still doesn’t answer the question. Why didn’t this movie suck?

According to Roger Ebert, “Each film is only as good as it’s villain.” Mortal Kombat had Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa playing the villain Shang Tsung, a sorcerer with the power to enslave souls.

The man owns this role. Do you recall what I said earlier about Street Fighter? How after fifteen years an even worse movie was made? Well, fifteen years after this movie, "Your soul is mine!" lives on in Mortal Kombat. Tagawa was even tapped to reprise his role in a new web series.

But there is a flaw:

So once again, the actor left his mark on the character. But he also wasn’t enough to lift the movie from so-so to good.

The script was cheesy. The fight scenes were flashy but brainless. The actors were and remain little known. Before someone jumps in the comments and says, “You forgot the guy from Highlander was in it!” let me say this: exactly. That’s exactly my point.

And we’re left with the same question. Why didn’t Mortal Kombat suck?

After dragging you this far into the blog, I don't have an answer for you. I only have a guess: the people who made this movie actually cared about what they were doing. They put forth a legitimate effort.

I can’t look back and see the pre-production meetings, or watch the special effects guys do their job, or get in the actors’ heads while they figure out what to do with their character. What I can do is look at the finished product they put out, and it was a blast. More than that, the finished product resonated with fans to the point that the movie influenced the entire franchise.

Can any other game-based movie make that claim? Can any of them claim that they enhanced the source material instead of embarrassing it?

Execution is everything. Mortal Kombat took itself the appropriate amount of serious. It didn’t forget it was a video game movie, and it went out of its way to include supernatural elements fans of the game wanted to see. Nor did it lose sight of the fact that it was a movie, and it had a chance to reach a bigger audience than just the game fans. While the movie certainly wasn’t flawless, it walked that line better than most.

There is one last question I would like to answer. Why does this blog exist?

About a week ago, I was pondering some of the rules of fanfiction. No Mary Sues allowed, self-inserts are bush league, things like that. Me, I’ve always thought good execution can make a decent story out of any idea. Am I wrong?

Maybe, maybe not. The point is, I now believe there is a difference between knowing what not to do and in knowing what to do.

The former is a great thing to learn, but the latter is necessary if we want to truly excel at whatever we are attempting. Hence, this blog trying to defend an okay movie from a bad stigma. Instead of poking holes in something good, I tried to prop up something that should have been bad. Mortal Kombat must have done something right.

I briefly considered turning this blog into a series. Me taking a look at movies or games or stories and trying to find the good in them, finding something to its credit that I could learn from and maybe emulate in my writing.

I think I failed in this blog. My conclusions of “give an effort” and “good execution” somehow manage to be both incredibly obvious and incredibly vague at the same time. So I now turn to you.

If you’d like, make a blog of your own like this. Pick something you enjoy, a guilty pleasure maybe, and tell your followers why you like it. Tell them what entertains you about it. Maybe an idea can be sparked by this. Someone, somewhere, might need one good idea for a story, and maybe hearing “Try this” instead of “Don’t do that” can give them that idea.

Let’s let people know what works.

And for no good reason, this.