2/10 What a journey. In honor of 2021’s “Mortal Kombat” koming out tomorrow, I thought I would katch up on all things MK related beforehand. I watched both movies from the 1990s for the first time and boy were they horrendous (particularly “Annihilation”). The two movies were followed up with this 22-episode TV show that was abruptly kanceled after one season. The quality is very similar to the two movies that kame before it. It is definitely a product of the 90’s and has aged horribly. The special effects in particular look like they are out of an original PlayStation video game. They use these transition shots before the action switches locations and they reuse the same shots with terrible CGI for every single episode, often multiple times in the same episode. The acting ranges from mediocre to horrendous. The dialogue is extremely kringe throughout most of the show. The production design/sets are awful as you kan klearly tell that the rocks, pillars and boulders are Styrofoam and there is always a wooden box for someone to get slammed onto during a fight that a feather would seem to break. Most episodes are standalone without much konnection to an overlapping story. What makes this problematic is when a major kharacter dies or someone falls in love and loses that person and are devastated, in the beginning of the next episode they are 100% fine and back to normal as if nothing had happened at all. Most of the fight khoreography is ridiculous as it is meant to look kool but not be practical in any way as to how people would actually fight. Someone will jump up in the air, do a full flip and the person has all the time in the world to move or duck yet they always managed to get kicked in the face. For a series in the MK universe, there is no Mortal Kombat kompetition the entire season, which felt odd to not have. Rayden is by far the worst character in the show and extremely annoying. All he does is give vague, obvious advice, never shows up until the danger has passed and is sarcastic without being funny. He was worthless every time he kame onscreen and I kouldn’t wait for him to leave. Many moments were so bad that they were laugh out loud hilarious and the ending of the entire season will leave you shocked that you spent 16 hours watching for an anti-klimactic, disappointing ending that will truly baffle you. As for the only positive aspects I kould think of, the show is able to fit in a ton of fight scenes, which were at least entertaining. It was impressive to see how many times a fight kould break out in one episode. The friendship between our three main kharacters (Kung Loa, Siro and Taja) was well developed over the kourse of the show and had some strong, heartfelt moments. It was also fun to see actors before they were famous like Kristanna Loken, Eva Mendes, Jaime Pressly (although her kharacter disappears without any klosure which was frustrating), Brooke Burns, etc. The pacing worked well as each episode flies by fairly quickly. In the end, how you feel about the original two movies will basically be how you feel about this. From the kheesy sound effects with each punch sounding like an axe hitting a tree to the villains who are evil just because to the boom mic dropping into the top of the screen during several episodes, this is a pretty painful part of the 1990s that we all wish we kould forget as we look forward to the reboot of the film series and pray it is nothing like this.
#ThatsSoRayden / #LokenWhiteGirl / #TajaCanYouHearMe / #FromSiroToHero / #TheEmperorsNewMove / #VorpaxDontDoIt
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