Category: Film and TV Reviews

Best and Worst of Mortal Kombat 2021

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*SPOILERS ABOUND*

You’ve been warned.

This is not a good movie. (That’s not the spoiler.) Don’t be fooled by the slick trailer or well-meaning but woefully misguided acquaintances. This movie is not worth an hour and 50 minutes of your time. It is worth precisely 11 minutes of your time. I know this because I timed it.

THE BEST

The aforementioned first 11 minutes.

We open on the Hanzo Hasashi Compound in Japan, 1617. Tokugawa period setting means one thing: some epicness is about to go down. A society so emotionally repressed that a husband has to surreptitiously lean into his wife to whisper, “I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no.” for fear someone in his household staff should overhear him acting like he even knows the woman? Yes, please. (What he actually says is quite lovely and I would be so blessed should someone ever express such a sentiment about me.) After he hies off to fetch more buckets of water, we get a close up on Chekhov’s kunai: lightweight and versatile, it is the discerning old timey Japanese farmer’s and ninja’s implement of choice. Hanzo’s wife is using it to plant some … plants and Hanzo will later fashion his “Scorpion tail” weapon out of it and some rope and then lay total and bloody waste to Bi-Han’s henchmen.

Bi who?

Bi-Han, later Sub-Zero, (who I resorted to calling Bi-Itch as the movie wore on because I am 12 years old, evidently) clearly has some kind of age old grudge to settle with Hasashi and his entire bloodline. As far as we non game playing viewers go, he’s some kind of amalgamated Kung Fu master with a nasty attitude and supernatural powers who relishes menacing women and children with his icicle hands.

There’s so much pathos and genuine emotion when Hanzo finds his wife and son slaughtered and encased in ice; that moment of tenderness he and his wife shared earlier now eclipsed by their murder. Hiroyuki Sanada does a lot of silent heavy lifting here and earns even more of his paycheck when his face hardens, and he turns into ninja terminator on a dime. Straight stabbing dudes through the crown of the head! You could give me three hours of this and I wouldn’t tire of it. The grace and precision with which Hanzo slices and dices his foes set against the idyllic setting of his home now defiled deserves a chef’s kiss; the geysers of blood more artful than gory also earns a hat tip.

I cackled at Bi-Han giving his speech, gloating about exterminating Hanzo’s bloodline and Hanzo’s like, “Yeah, no idea what you’re saying ‘cause I don’t understand Chinese, but I’m gonna lay down a whooping on you all the same.” Did Bi-Han tell his Japanese language tutor, “Yo, I need just enough Japanese to terrorize Hasashi’s wife and kid, but I don’t wanna have to memorize my whole triumphant screed about how I’m finally gonna succeed at eradicating his bloodline. He can probably figure that out from context anyway.” Did he learn to say two things: Where is the bathroom and where is Hanzo? Tourists, man. Hanzo was probably like, “Are you still mad I didn’t invite you out to karaoke that one time? It was totally last minute and they were my college buddies who you don’t know anyway. Slaughtering my family is kind of a disproportionate response, don’t you think?”

The fight choreography in this opening sequence was stellar with both Hanzo and Bi-Han near flawless in their fighting styles. Had they kept the rest of the movie as the story between these two foes, it would have been a far better viewing experience. Unfortunately for Hanzo and all of us because it meant the birth of the rest of this, for lack of a better word, “story,” Bi-Han does succeed in delivering the killing blow thereby depriving us of the best character in this whole movie. You’re the worst, Bi-Itch. The worst.

THE WORST (Besides Bi-Han)

The rest of this movie.

The first eleven minutes is what suckered me into watching the whole thing as I vainly hoped that rad opening wasn’t just a fluke. It was just a fluke. It’s like two different movies Frankensteined together. And like Frankenstein’s monster, it leads to disaster. Everything after Raiden makes his attention whoring entrance with a cheesy lighting display and engages in some light babynapping is a boring generic mess that nobody, not even the characters themselves, cares about. You can see the will to live ebbing from their expressions with each passing scene. Kung Lao, who gets his soul sucked away by Shang Tsung, was probably wishing it could have happened several scenes earlier just to free himself from this steaming pile of fetid nonsense that’s been fermenting in the hot sun so long that not even the raccoons will give it a glance.

No, giving this an R rating doesn’t make it a less sucky movie. It just makes it a terrible movie with f bombs and blood spattered around. So like when you carpet bomb the bathroom with some floral scented room spray after annihilating the commode with the remains of your Taco Bell extravaganza. You only made the doo doo smell worse by hot gluing dead rotten flowers to your turd grenades and now the stench is clinging to your clothes and hair making you radioactive for the next week.

To be fair, there’s probably enough for fans of the game to enjoy here. There are a ton of fights, all of them bloody, all of them fatal, though no actual tournament. All game characters deliver their signature finishing moves so there’s plenty for past players to feel nostalgic about and present players to feel smug about since they can point out all the Easter eggs to their non playing friends who, trust me, do NOT care.

The character of Cole Young, predictably a MMA fighter past his prime and instantly forgettable, (played by Lewis Tan who auditioned for Marvel’s Shang-Chi but lost out to Simu Liu because they wanted a lead with comedic chops, if that and the casting of Awkwafina gives you an indication of the tone of that movie) isn’t an in-game character and was created specifically for this film. Which makes me ask why the character had to be a dude at all? Why couldn’t we have an ass kicking female descendant of Hanzo’s defending Earthrealm from Outworld’s incursions? Did they think viewers would be confused since Hanzo’s daughter was the sole survivor, and we’d think the present day character, hundreds of years later, is his actual daughter? Or did they think that one Earthrealm lady fighter in the form of Sonya Blade was more than enough? I shouldn’t have to point out how stupid that is. If you can have five (four and then three depending on where you are in the movie) dudes as Earthrealm’s champions, you can have two ladies at minimum. That was a missed opportunity.

The most annoying part of this movie is not that the majority of it was so terrible, it makes you lose all faith in humanity. It’s that there was a much better story lurking around the edges of this devil’s spawn gift that keeps on giving. Hanzo Hasashi was on screen for a fraction of the entire movie’s run time and yet he was a much more compelling character than all of Earthrealm’s champions put together. I would have much preferred to watch his backstory leading up to Bi-Han’s attack on his home and/or his journey to hell and how he conquered its fires. Stop teasing me with these poseur badasses when you had the real deal engaging in awesomeness off camera. It’s like the John Wick movies without John Wick, just a bunch of rando assassins.

They’re planning four more movies, hoping to capture some MCU style magic and box office success, but that’s easily six movies too many. Just give me one movie focused solely on Hanzo Hasashi and I might forgive you the atrocity that was this first one.

 

 

Why John Wick Should Be Your Desert Island Movie

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There is something about this movie that fills me with glee. Is it all the shooting, punching and kicking?  Is it all the well-tailored suits? Is it The Keanu?  Yes and yes and yes again.

Action movie Keanu is my favorite Keanu. Second only to action science fiction Keanu. He only has two speeds in this movie: sad and mad. 

What’s the set up?

John Wick’s wife dies of a protracted illness. It’s all very sad.  And then Theon Greyjoy pops up and Theon Greyjoys all over the place. Which is to say, spreads his particular brand of pathetic douchebaggery all over Keanu’s very nice home. Theon, or Ioseph, as they call him in this movie, and his lackeys break into John Wick’s house in the middle of the night, beat the ever living boom boom out of John and then steal his ride because Ioseph is nothing more than a skin bag of ambulatory meat and bones awfulness. And an idiot.  So, you know, Theon Greyjoy.  In fairness, it’s quite an impressive ride. Ioseph also commits a much more heinous crime than grand theft auto. Something so terrible that anyone anywhere can suddenly understand why John Wick goes on a mighty rampage following the defiling of his home and theft of his ’69 Mustang. Come on, man, the dog. I thought there was some kind of unwritten Hollywood rule about harming animals on screen.

Ugh.

Not that I ever need an excuse to watch Keanu rampaging with gun-fu and kung-fu all through a blighted city. As per the trailers, John Wick, is a retired assassin. To hear them tell it, the greatest assassin that ever assassined for all time and space.  Ioseph tries to unload his stolen goods at Aurelio’s (John Leguizamo) chop shop but, being possessed of two grey cells to rub together, Aurelio demands to know where Ioseph got the ride and then proceeds to smack him around.  It’s… kind of awesome.  Ioseph cries and threatens to tattle on him to his daddy and Aurelio is like, beat it, pinhead.  So Ioseph takes off with the car and Aurelio sweats it because he knows.

Here is the thing about this movie.  It’s funny.  Very funny.  The laughs it elicits from single syllable dialogue is masterful. 

As promised, Ioseph goes home to Russian gangster daddy, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), and tattles on Aurelio smacking him like the whiny diaper baby that he is.  And so Viggo gets on the horn with Aurelio and is like, so I hear you hit my kid?  And Aurelio is like, Yup. Viggo is like, ….?  And Aurelio busts it, He stole John Wick’s car. And jacked up his dog. And then, I kid you not, Viggo goes, “Oh.”  And then hangs up as sweaty bullets of nerves and fear leak out of every pore.  Then he goes over to his kid and punches him in the gut a few times because Ioseph is an idiot. Who then tries to swagger his way out of it like, who’s this John Wick guy anyway? Some kind of Boogeyman, he sneers.  I mean, sneers because have I mentioned?  He’s an idiot.  Just assume that for every time I type Ioseph, I am just leaving off The Idiot right after it.  And so Viggo is like, No, fool.  He’s the one you send to kill the Boogeyman. And then we launch into some John Wick back story which goes something like this: he used to work for Viggo and then one day wanted out “over a woman, of course” and whereas Viggo may be smarter than his son, he certainly rivals him in overall dickitude, he tells John Wick he can have his freedom but he has to do one last job first.  Which is the most impossible job that an entire horde of assassins couldn’t have pulled off, but John is one part ninja, one part murder unicorn and all parts awesome.  So, not only does he survive the job, but he piled so many bodies around the city, they could start their own methane plant.  Viggo says the work Wick did that night laid the entire foundation for his business today.  And his idiot son went and stole his car and then the thing with the dog.  Viggo basically tells his kid he’s screwed. Death is coming for him and despite all their best efforts, they’re not going to be able to stop the inevitable carnage. Ioseph had the good grace to look properly chastised.  Or constipated. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Dean Winters has a marvelous supporting role here as Viggo’s lawyer, Avi. I’m so used to seeing him be the wise-cracking muscle that seeing him as this jumpy numbers guy who doesn’t even carry a gun just brought another dimension of laughs.

So now we’ve set the stage. It’s a revenge rampage film. But one of the better ones because a) Keanu and b) it’s funny.  Sure, it’s not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I completely buy into Keanu as John Wick being a complete bad ass who ran out of cares to give the second he realized that the dog his wife gave him as her dying gift to him was no more. What can you do after that? If you answered put the remains of your puppy in a nice box, respectfully bury her in the back yard and then sledgehammer your way through your floor to get at your assassin murder tools, you win the door prize.  There are no real surprises in this movie; no hackneyed M. Knight twists at the end; no last minute betrayals; no overwrought emotional outbursts or pointless monologues. What you see is what you get. Here is a guy in a black suit and he’s coming to kill you.   

There are some brief fun interludes from the relentless bloodletting with … more killing. But it’s at least killing outside of Wick’s revenge-porn.  The Continental is the preferred hotel for discerning assassins because they are discreet and accommodating of the unusual vicissitudes of their type of work, but they are very strict about enforcing the rules. And the number one rule is: No business on Continental grounds. Winston (Ian McShane) prides himself on the hallowed neutral ground he’s carved out of this murder soaked town.  And the penalty is steep for anyone who breaks the rules, as Ms. Perkins (Adriane Palicki) discovered when she broke the rules twice over. It’s a terrible thing that both female actresses in this movie end up dead with the third one spouting such horrific dialogue that she should have also been killed.

The one criticism I have for this movie, and it’s a big one, is that it is lousy for female characters and representation. Sadly, we must all look elsewhere for that. The three aforementioned women are it for the entire run time. Passing the Bechtel test, they are not. Making one of them a codeless (and it turns out incapable) assassin acquits them of nothing here. John Wick’s wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan), we only see in flashbacks and on a saved video on John’s phone that he rewatches every time someone pauses in their bid to kill him.  So maybe every ten minutes or so.  They introduce one fairly useless female bartender, Addy (Bridget Regan… ok, it’s weird that two of the three women in this movie are named Bridget, right?) whose only purpose is to spout dialogue so cringeworthy that I very nearly gagged in my seat. They did give her a name so there’s that at least. The writers had to find a way for someone somewhere to tell John where Ioseph was hanging out, and apparently, they couldn’t find a better way than having her leave a note on a napkin. It’s bad, not gonna lie. Oh, wait. The dog, Daisy, is also female. But talking about her makes me sad so I won’t. 

There’s a point in the movie when John really lets all his anger unfurl.  He’s trussed up in a chair with no clear means of escape, surrounded by lots of men with guns.  And Wick snarls, “A lot of people have been asking if I’m back.  Yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.”  Yeah, you are, Keanu.  Yeah, you are.