Videogame Cinema: Mortal Kombat Annihilation

In a sea of godawful videogame cinematic adaptations, Mortal Kombat stands out as one of the few bright spots. It’s not a perfect film, from a pure movie experience it has more issues than Detective Comics, but as a cheesy martial arts popcorn flick it is a lot of fun.

It was also a modest box office success. It wasn’t breaking the bank or anything but compared to other video game movies at the time which bombed so hard they sometimes took the studios with them (hi Final Fantasy Spirits Within) it did pretty damn well.

So naturally that means a sequel was in the works. Makes sense considering the game series was still tearing it up on the arcade figuratively and literally. Although not quite as much as it used to.

See, while in the early nineties Mortal Kombat was the hottest thing around, by the mid to late nineties its heat was starting to flicker down. Mortal Kombat 3 did ok, but it’s change to a more urban style, goofier finishing moves and lack of ninja’s divided fans. Although the last point was amended in the Ultimate edition that landed a few months after.

It still did well, but not quite as well as its predecessor. Funnily enough though, Mortal Kombat 3 came out the same year as the movie; meaning the film released right at the apex of the series initial popularity. But if that’s the case then that means the follow up… oh dear.

Yeah, the sequel was releasing at the time when the series was beginning to decline commercially. In fact, the year it released, 1997 to be exact, was the very year that the series hit the proverbial wall.

In that same year Midway would release the fourth entry which was a middling attempt to bring the series into 3D, and the abysmally bad Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero; a spin off that tried to bring the fighting gameplay into a side scrolling format and failed miserably at it.

Mortal Kombat was not doing so well. It was starting to fall by the wayside as other fighters were taking the spotlight. I remember as a kid vaguely seeing the MK logo around, but as far as fighters were concerned the big names in the game were Tekken and Soul Calibur.

I went over this in a previous post that you can check out that I’ll link at the bottom if you want more detail but suffice to say it was a dark time for the series. Don’t worry though, because the second film, dubbed Mortal Kombat Annihilation, would proceed to make things even worse.

To be blunt, Mortal Kombat Annihilation was a complete disaster. It bombed at the box office, was panned by critics and audiences alike. This film is considered so bad it’s often signalled out as the thing that nearly killed the franchise. Well this and Special Forces, but that’s a whole other story.

What the hell happened? Larry Kasanoff happened that’s what. Kasanoff was the producer of the first film and was the one personally responsible for pitching the idea of doing the film to Midway.

But it wasn’t just the film he wanted. Kasanoff also wanted to turn Mortal Kombat into a multimedia empire with stage shows, cartoons, tv shows etc. All of which did happen even if the quality of those projects was sub-par at best, and I do mean at best you don’t want to know what it was like at worst.

Kasanoff was pumping out these multimedia projects at rapid fire pace. So fast in fact that when the second movie was greenlit they lost some of the crew. Most of them came back, but the main guys, the writer and the director did not due to being involved with other projects.

Paul W.S Anderson was too busy working on Event Horizon, while the writer opted out of the project and worked on Wing Commander instead. Oh god I’m going to have to look at Wing Commander at some point aren’t I.

Larry’s solution to losing the most vital positions was simply to promote other members of the crew. So the director of photography from the first movie, John R. Leonetti, was now the lead director of this movie.

I don’t think I need to tell you what a bad idea this is. The director of photography and lead director positions are very different. One simply has to make sure the films shots look nice, while the other has to manage everything the fuck else.

Just because you’re good at directing photography doesn’t mean you’re up to directing a full movie. Especially when you have no prior experience in the position like Leonetti had at this point.

As far as the writers were concerned, we have three. Brent V. Friedman who looks to have primarily worked in TV, Bryce Zabel who also seems to have worked primarily in TV but also wrote the underrated Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Larry Kasanoff himself. The producer took a writing position on the movie. Oh boy, that always ends well doesn’t well.

Ok, technically he only has a story credit. The actual screenplay was done by Zabel and Friedman. Still, the fact that Kasanoff had any hand in the writing process is not a good sign since the man is not a writer. He had no prior writing credits at that time and his only other writing credit past this point was for Foodfight. And if you don’t know what that is, I envy you.

It gets worse. While most of the crew came back, the cast did not. The only returning cast members were Robert Shou as Liu Kang and Talia Soto as Kitana. Everyone else dropped out. Kasanoff claiming that this was due to business and money issues; saying that the sequel would mean they’d get paid more and that they weren’t available given how fast they needed the movie out.

This is, of course, bullshit. Most of the actors dropped out simply because they didn’t like the script. Christopher Lambert took one look at the script and bounced faster than a Jack Rabbit on meth, and considering that he agreed to do Highlander 2 that says a lot.

Although there is a nugget of truth to what Kasanoff said. Bridgette Wilson had to drop out due to being busy with other projects, and Linden Ashby did leave due to a pay dispute, and the fact that his character was killed off in the first ten minutes.

They had to recast everyone, something Linden Ashby said hurt the film since the audience didn’t recognise anyone. He isn’t wrong. Recasting like this is risky since audiences will often associate a character with a certain actor. Even the game series ran into this problem a few times.

So, who did they get to replace the actors from the first film. Nobody you would recognise; the only two actors of note are Brian Thompson as Shao Kahn and James Remar as Raiden since those two at least have a lot of acting credits to their name.

Everyone else was either a stunt man, a complete nobody, or an American Gladiator. Yes, they got some of the cast of American Gladiators to do this movie. If that doesn’t give you an idea for how bad the movie turned out nothing will.

And bad it most certainly turned out to be. To give you an idea of how bad this movie is, it is the second lowest video game-based movie ever made. It’s rated worse than any of the other films we’ve looked at, worse than Double Dragon, worse than Street Fighter, worse than even Super Mario Bros.

It only has a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes people, and to give you an idea of how bad that is here’s a list of films with higher ratings than it. Catwoman, The Last Airbender, Howard the Duck, Movie 43 and The Room. The Room has a higher Rotten Tomato score than Mortal Kombat Annihilation.

You may think this is an exaggeration. Surely the movie can’t be that bad right? No, no it really is that bad. This movie is awful; truly abysmal on every single level. It’s not just the worst movie I’ve reviewed on this segment, it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life.

But before we get into how the movie is so bad let’s talk about the positives. We’ll start with the good stuff first and work our way up to the bad.

Well that was nice, now for what makes the movie suck. I’m not joking with that bit either. I legitimately can’t think of a single area that the movie gets right. The writing, the story, the action, the acting (dear god the acting), the special effects (oh dear god the special effects, even the music is all dreadful.

Actually, why don’t we start with the music. The music in the first movie was one of the best parts. The high energy techno really added to the fight scenes and it sounded great.

Annihilation keeps the same techno styled music, but it sounds so much worse. it sounds like the same kind of shitty overproduced techno garbage you’d hear in a grungy underground club. You know the kind of place where you try to get a decent groove on but you can’t because half the crowd are fat sweaty goth girls with BO so horrendous they make you want to throw up.

There’s no rhythm or beat to any of it; it’s like dub step only somehow lamer. And this is coming from someone who likes techno music, so I’m not saying the music is shit because it’s from a genre I don’t like, it’s just shit.

It doesn’t even sound like it’s mixed properly. Half the time it doesn’t match the scene at all and will often fade out to another song in the middle of a fight, or at least that’s what it sounds like. This isn’t a soundtrack; this is one of the crews mixtapes they accidentally put in the movie.

Even the sound effects and ADR sound bad. Not only do voice overs not match the lip movements, but they sound like they were recorded in a barn with a coffee can. How do you fuck up basic sound mixing.

That’s the thing with Mortal Kombat Annihilation. It isn’t bad for any of the major things you would expect like a bad story or performances, although trust me those are the stuff of legend, it’s bad because of basic shit. Editing, sound mixing and the like.

I just went over the sound mixing so let’s cover the editing. Let me ask you a question, what do you expect out of a film’s editing? I imagine it’s probably little more than cutting scenes in such a way that the audience can follow what’s going on and keep up with the action.

Well guess what, Mortal Kombat Annihilation can’t even get this right. It’s almost impressive how much it botches this. In the first 5 minutes of the movie, I saw Shao Kahn throw a rope at Raiden, only for it to cut and reveal he hit Sonya despite her being nowhere near where he fired the rope.

And that’s one of the mild cases of incompetence. There are dialogue scenes cut together so haphazardly you swear they must of cut vital parts out of the conversation. There was one scene I had to rewind multiple times because I had no fucking clue what just happened because of how shoddily it was cut together.

It even commits the sin of reusing footage in the wrong areas. There’s a scene later in the movie where Baraka, who looks awful in this by the way and not in the intended way, gets killed by being knocked into a fire pit. Except the scene showing this is from earlier in the movie where Rain got knocked into a fire pit.

They showed a guy dying twice for two different people, and yes, it is noticeable. I’d call it amateurish but that would be an insult to amateurs. It’s so bad you’d think the movie wasn’t finished, and you’d actually be right.

The movie never got a proper second cut. It should have, but after test audiences reacted positively to the movie New Line decided to just release what they had.

First off, who the fuck was in this test audience and what were they on. Because I refuse to believe that anyone of sound mind or sobriety could ever find any joy in this piece of shit. Second, even if the test audience reacted positively that doesn’t mean the film is finished.

There were clear continuity errors and blatant mistakes that needed to be ironed out. You can’t release a clearly unfinished product to the masses, that’s the gaming industries job.

All these editing guffaws makes it nigh impossible to figure out what in the hell is going on. The script doesn’t help matters either, but I guess at this point I should get into the nitty gritty and talk about the story.

The film picks up exactly where the first movie left off. After winning the Mortal Kombat tournament and returning home only to find out Outworld has invaded Earthrealm anyway due to the machinations of Shao Kahn. How did he do this despite them winning the tournament and closing the portal? Good question.

Anyway, the characters have to go on a journey to stop him. Liu Kang then has to do this vision quest to find his Animality, Sonya does something in the desert with Jax who has robot arms, Johnny Cage dies and people just forget about him, robots are involved somehow, Kitana’s mother Sindel is somehow involved.

Yeah, I have no fucking clue what the story is supposed to be. Unlike the first movie where there was a clear focus on the three main characters and their development, here there’s no focus at all.

It jumps from scene to scene with no rhyme or reason at all. juggling so many characters that it can’t stop to develop any of the main leads at all. Say what you want about the first movie, it may have been light on plot, but it at least gave it’s cast understandable motivations and character arcs.

Here they have no character arcs. I don’t even buy them as a team. they try to make a big deal about the characters working together and how they’re a family, yet they spend half the movie apart from each other so they never feel like one.

They don’t even a moment between them. Half the dialogue between them is just exposition. I won’t say the character interactions in the first movie was the finest in cinema, but it still felt like they were growing closer as friends. Here they come across as acquaintances, at best.

Speaking of exposition, despite nearly all the dialogue being exposition it has this chronic need to never explain anything to the audience. I alluded to it earlier, but the movie never fully explains how Shao Kahn is able to keep the portal to Outworld open.

It’s hinted that it has something to do with Sindel, but as to how or why that’s the case the movie never elaborates. Now if you’d played the games you’d know why, it’s because Sindel was resurrected on Earthrealm and Shao Kahn went to get her back, but if you hadn’t played it then you would never figure that out. It doesn’t explain shit.

Even the characters don’t explain anything to each other. Sonya drags Jax around the desert for hours without explaining anything of what’s going on. The two fought a cyborg together and she didn’t bother explaining what the hell was happening. I know Sonya is a little bitchy but this is ridiculous.

It’s pretty abundantly obvious that this movie was not made with general audiences in mind. They clearly wanted to make it for fans of the game, but that’s no excuse. Just because I played the game and understand what is happening doesn’t mean you don’t have to explain anything. How can I follow the story if you don’t tell the fucking story.

Even then, there are some changes made to parts of the story that fans hated. Raiden and Shao Kahn being brothers and sons of Shinnok is just weird. It adds nothing to the movie, and it wasn’t something hinted at in any of the games so why bother with it.

The worst change though is what they did with Jade. Turning her into a traitorous turn coat who tries to lure the heroes into a trap. Isn’t that Tanya’s thing? Well why not just make her Tanya then. You already put Shinnok in the movie, why not add another Mortal Kombat 4 character.

So even fans won’t like it, nor did they. Besides changing characters around for reasons, the movie throws in so many characters and concepts from the games with no real explanation on who they are or why they’re here.

Scorpion and Sub Zero are here, despite both dying in the first movie so that’s going to confuse the newbies. They appear in one scene, have a fight scene and then just vanish. They set up Sub Zero being hunted by robots, but why is he being hunted by robots?

In the games Sub Zero is a member of the Lin Kuei ninja clan and he leaves after they start making themselves into robots. But in the first movie he’s simply a brainwashed assassin, his history with the Lin Kuei, if he even has one in the movie continuity, is unknown. So who the fuck are the robots then.

Even if you want to look at these appearances as fan service it doesn’t work. Half the characters don’t do anything of importance and end up being little more than fodder. Rain and Sheeva get it the worst since they’re killed off before they can do anything cool.

Annihilation ironically has the exact opposite problem the first movie did. While the first movie had too few characters from the game and had to create new ones, this movie has too many and can’t seem to cut any of them out no matter how superfluous they are.

The only characters from the games, at least the ones released at the time, that didn’t make it in are Kung Lao, Noob Saibot, Kabal and Stryker. The latter two are name dropped but don’t actually appear.

I’d say that sucks for their fans but considering how bad the movie is I’d say they got off easy. At least they got to keep their dignity, and Stryker has little dignity as is so he definitely lucked out.

Even the main cast don’t get off easy. Raiden winds up looking like a pound shop Billy Idol, Kitana spends half the movie in a cage, and then there’s Liu Kang. Poor Liu Kang they did him dirty.

Liu Kang’s arc, if you can call it that, is getting ready to face Shao Kahn. They make a big deal that he isn’t ready to face Kahn in battle. To show this they turn Kang into a completely useless jobber for most of the movie. Despite being a competent warrior in the first movie, he’s rendered utterly impotent in the sequel.

He lets Kitana get kidnapped, he stands around watching other people fight despite being capable enough to help out, even Jade gives him a hard time. The games treat him better than this, and they killed him, twice.

The villains all suck too especially Shao Kahn. Which annoys me because in the games he’s cool. He’s a super powered up war lord who talks shit to you while he’s kicking your ass. The movie version is an idiot who makes the dumbest mistakes.

He kills off two of henchmen for no reason. He kills Rain off for capturing Stryker and Kabal but not killing them, even though Rain did that specifically to get information out of them, and he kills Tanya off for not leading the heroes into an ambush he didn’t set up properly.

He doesn’t even wear his iconic skull helmet throughout most the movie, so he doesn’t even look like Shao Kahn. He just looks like a big bald guy. Mind you the helmet looks awful in this so maybe it was for the best.

It’s a shame because in the first movie he looked awesome. He had a half dragon thing going on which is accurate to the games and it was a really intimidating design. Why did they drop that, it’s not like they didn’t have the money for it, but I’ll get to that later.

This story is wretched. There’s so many holes and plot threads that go nowhere or are dropped unceremoniously. At one point Liu Kang has to do this thing with Nightwolf to unlock his Animality by doing three tests. He does one test, Nightwolf then vanishes from the movie, and the Animality doesn’t even matter in the end. What was the point of all that then?!

The lack of focus really is the biggest problem here. It’s like the movie has ADHD; it jumps from one scene to another and can’t keep still for five minutes. That’s because the movie isn’t even vaguely interested in telling a story, it just wants to get to the action. It’s like that one guy who skips the cutscenes in every game.

So, apparently, the first movie got some negative feedback in testing due to a lack of action. This resulted in them having to do reshoots so they could film more action sequences. To avoid that issue in the sequel they decided to focus entirely on the fight scenes.

So, instead of shooting an actual film with a story and maybe having to shoot more action later like last time, they decided to shoot a bunch of action scenes and work the movie around that? That’s like trying to fix a broken light bulb by smacking it with a hammer.

Alright, so the movie is all about the action. That’s fine, a lot of movies are like that. But here’s the thing, that only works if the action is, you know, good.

Besides the godawful music not matching the action, the choreography is a huge step down from the original. The moves look utterly ridiculous and there’s an obnoxious amount of flips involved.

There’s more flipping and air twists than a breakdance routine. They’ll even do a flip just to have a conversation. Why? Is it too hard to walk. In Raiden’s fight with the two Reptile clones, they spend the first half spinning around each other. Just throw a damn punch for god’s sake.

The biggest issue with the action is how pointless a lot of it is. There are a lot of fight scenes and most of them don’t add anything to the plot or characters. I don’t mind some mindless action, but you need to make sure the action sequences tie into what’s going on in the story. Otherwise, it’s just empty white noise.

The random fights in the games had more narrative impact than these. And because the action is unrelenting, it honestly feels like there’s a fight every 10 seconds, it just gets exhausting. For a movie with this much action it’s surprisingly boring. I would have fallen asleep if I wasn’t horrified at how bad the movie was.

One of the more egregious examples of this is the fight between Sonya and Mileena. It comes out of nowhere and all it amounts to is a mud wrestling fight. It’s just there for titillation but it’s so desperate and out of place it comes off as insulting. I know the games outfits could be revealing but this is just degrading. I feel sorry for the actresses.

I’ll give the movie this, it at least incorporates a lot of the special moves from the games. That’s something you’d want to see as a fan. Unfortunately, they screwed this up to.

The effects in this movie are horrendous. I know the effects in the first movie weren’t great either, but that at least had some cool practical effects thrown in and the CG wasn’t used that often.

Annihilation not only doesn’t have many practical effects, but the CG somehow looks worse. Well, ok it doesn’t look worse. It does look slightly better than the first movie, but it’s still terrible. Even for the time it looked awful, and there’s way more of it too so it’s far harder to ignore.

The final fight between Liu Kang and Shao Kahn is probably the worst of it. They turn into these dragon creatures and have a big CG fight. It’s like a Ray Harryhausen movie if he didn’t try and had zero budget.

Even stuff like keying and green screen effects are done poorly. You know the moment where a character jumps out of the way of an explosion. Course you do, it’s a pretty standard thing in action movies.

Well they do that here and it’s laughable. You can practically see the edges on the actors the keying is so bad. I’ve seen YouTube videos with less than 1% this films budget with better green screen effects than this. But this raises a question, how could the effects be this bad when the movie had more than double the budget of the first?

Well that’s because most of the budget went to location shoots. They shot the movie in various places around the world and that ate up most of the budget. Not that you would notice that watching the movie because everything looks the damn same.

It’s mostly just deserts or barren wastelands for the outdoor sequences. There’s a cool temple but I’m 99% sure that’s a set, as most of the other internal scenes are. Why did they even bother filming on location anyway? It’s not like deserts are hard to find in the US and it would have saved money they could spent the effects.

It really goes to show how mismanaged the whole movie is. the whole point of shooting on location is to get beautiful exotic locales you can’t get anywhere else. Deserts are not beautiful, they’re deserts. It’s just barren rock and sand.

Street Fighter had huge problems with it’s location shoots but at least they used the locations effectively. This doesn’t and just wasted half of their money. My god, can these chuckle fucks get anything right.

Then there’s the acting. Just going to be blunt with this, it’s all bad. Everyone is either not giving a single shit with their performance or is chewing the scenery like they’re in an all you can eat buffet.

The only two actors who seem to be actually trying are Robin Shou and James Remar. Not that they’re good but they at least seem professional. Everyone else is clearly just there for the paycheck.

It’s hard to single anyone in particular since they’re all pretty bad, but I have to call out Talia Soto. I went easy on her last time due to her not having much to work with but no she just sucks. This woman has the charisma and acting range of a gym locker. She was a model before becoming an actress and it shows; outside of her looks she is worthless in this.

Look, I could go on I really could, but I think describing why the movie is bad is missing the forest for the trees. I’m just going to show you a clip; just a single 8 second clip from the movie.

This clip fascinates me. It’s bad, undeniably so, but I wanted to know why. Oh I can point to certain things, the mix of under acting and overacting that cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter, the weird Shatneresque pause, the fact that the mother looks younger than the daughter, the lines not linking together at all, but none of those seemed to encompass the entirety of its awfulness.

Against all sane and rational judgement, I watched it multiple times. Studying it to figure out the exact reason why it sucked so much. And that’s when it hit me, a revelation that finally made it all make sense. There is no reason.

There’s no specific reason why this clip is as bad as it is, it just is. It is the complete absence of good, it is badness in all its purified essence wrapped into a mere 15 seconds. Let all who gaze upon weep and despair.

Folks, that’s the entire movie. Everything I’ve been over shows how the movie is so incompetently put together, but that’s not why it’s bad. It’s bad because it’s just bad.

If badness is the complete opposite of goodness then truly bad things must have no good in them whatsoever. This movie is the perfect example of that. It is pure awfulness distilled into an hour and a half.

Super Mario Bros was bad but at least it was an interesting failure, Street Fighter and Double Dragon are bad but enjoyably so, even Spirits Within had some competent editing and sound mixing, Mortal Kombat Annihilation has nothing. Not a single redeeming quality whatsoever.

It is a complete train wreck on all levels. The writing? Atrocious. The acting? Abysmal? The effects? Appalling. It can’t even get basic editing and sound mixing right.

It doesn’t even cross the line into so bad it’s good. With those you need to have some kind of entertainment value; a unique charm that makes you likeable. This is as far from likeable as you can get. It’s nothing but sound and fury made by an idiot signifying nothing.

The only way I can recommend this is if you’re super into Mortal Kombat and need to see everything the franchise has to offer or as a torture device. Other than that, stay as far away from it as you can.

Suffice to say, this movie didn’t do very well. It did make a tiny profit, but only just barely, and the critical reception was so bad it killed any prospect of a sequel. There were plans to make a sequel under the name Mortal Kombat Devastation, but it languished in development hell for years until Warner Bros got the rights and rebooted the franchise.

Leaving Mortal Kombat Annihilation as a sad end to what could have been a decent film series. The first film showed there was a lot of promise and the follow up, fittingly enough, annihilated it. Even series creator Ed Boon called it the worst thing to happen to the franchise, and I cannot argue against him.

Well, we’ve officially hit rock bottom. Which is good I guess since there’s nowhere to go but up. Wait, didn’t I say this was the second worst video game movie? Does… does that mean there’s one that’s worse!

Oh no, I am not going down that rabbit hole anytime soon. That’s for future me to worry about. Next time I think I could use a palette cleanser. Something to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. So why don’t we look at an animated movie that isn’t based on a video game, but heavily inspired by them.