Mortal Kombat [2021]
Dir: Simon McQuoid
The last Mortal Kombat game I played was probably the third; the series’ last 16 Bit venture, and I saw Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 film once, and have never felt the need to revisit it, so I am not at all versed in the lore, but the story here is perfectly accessible to newcomers. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is at the tail end of his career, but after a fight he’s told by Jax (Mehcad Brooks) that his dragon shaped birthmark means he has been chosen as one of the champions of Earth for the upcoming Mortal Kombat championship. However, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) has dispatched his fighters—including Sub Zero (Joe Taslim)—to kill as many of Earth’s champions as possible, to win the tournament before it can start.
It is an odd choice, with a game as packed with characters to choose from as this one (the latest edition has 32, discounting some characters from other franchises) to create an entirely new character to act as the audience surrogate. That said, Lewis Tan, like the rest of the actors here, does what he can with fairly basic material. Where character should be, Cole has a wife and daughter (Laura Brent and Matilda Kimber) to protect. This does provide a link to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose family Sub Zero murders in the prologue, but there’s not much more there than a couple of walking plot devices. The rest of the writing is largely functional, though Kano’s constant f bomb heavy quips, and casual misogyny towards Sonya (Jessica McNamee) get to be wearing pretty quickly. That said, this is Mortal Kombat. I suspect there is a deeper and richer backstory that fans might want to see, but as a casual viewer, I’m not really looking for great emotional depth here… I just want to see some good, bloody, fights.
On an action level, Mortal Kombat delivers. The fight the fans want to see is between Sub Zero and Scorpion, and we get one of those at either end of the film. Joe Taslim, though almost always masked, makes for a pretty menacing villain—it helps that the costume design is more intricate and less primary coloured than in the previous films—and his throwdowns with Sanada are fast, furious, and brutal. There is a little overcutting but the sequences aren’t just a blur of fists and feet. Director Simon McQuoid pulls back fairly frequently to allow us to see sequences of martial arts and emphasises the right moments, particularly the solidly impressive effects used to realise Sub Zero’s powers (a dagger frozen out of his opponent’s blood is the film’s single coolest image) If anything, the film has bigger editing problems in its dramatic scenes, which indicate large chunks having been cut out, than during its fights. Each fighter has their own style, with Ludi Lin and Max Huang as Liu Kang and Kung Lao much more graceful than the pure brute force of Kano (Josh Lawson) and Jax. Sonya Blade is a little underused, and it’s strange to have her not be one of the chosen fighters in the beginning. The subplot of the fighters having to discover their special abilities isn’t a bad idea, but it’s underexplored and few of those abilities have any connection to even the loose sense we have of who they are. On the other hand, the effects do generally look cool, and they aren’t overused to the point that they become what the fights revolve around.
Mortal Kombat is no masterpiece; the action has its moments, but it doesn’t get close to some of the best work being done in the genre right now, whether that’s the John Wick’s of the world, the films Taslim was making back in Indonesia or even some of Scott Adkins’ DTV work and the threadbare story and characters don’t give us a lot to invest in. What it is, though, is fun. It ticks the boxes it needs to tick, it’s solidly entertaining and at 109 minutes including credits it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In this case, I’m perfectly happy with a bit of Ronseal filmmaking.
★★★
Wrong Turn [2021]
Dir: Mike P. Nelson
It no doubt helps that I have no investment in Wrong Turn. I saw the 2003 film when it came out on DVD and, while I liked it well enough, probably haven’t watched it more than once more in the following 16 plus years. I’ve also never seen any of the sequels, so I can’t claim any affection for it as a franchise. That said, the first 40 minutes or so of this version (written by original screenwriter Alan McElroy) feel pretty familiar. A group of six friends (on a hiking trip this time, rather than being waylaid by a car accident) find themselves lost in the Virginia woods and having to survive when they are threatened by a family of sorts living in the forest. The details have changed somewhat—particularly with the addition of a framing story about Scott (Matthew Modine), the father of our lead, Jen (Charlotte Vega), looking for his daughter six weeks after she has dropped off the map—but the basic shape of the film is similar enough that it makes some sense as a remake. The second hour, however, is very different and seems to have divided fans of the original film.
In its second half the film takes a sharp diversion from the backwoods slasher it’s been hinting it would be, turning more to folk and survival horror, though with a generous helping of gore. Bill Sage plays a patriarch who still leads a family of sorts that one could call inbred, but both the society and the individuals within it are very different from those in the original. I can see how this bait and switch could be seen as a negative for fans of the franchise, but credit to McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson for trying something very different from the original, if not so much in its own right.
The character writing isn’t the strong suit here. Bill Sage’s performance; more restrained than you might expect, and more effective for it, is the standout. He also gets the best material McElroy has to offer. Jen is a fairly bland lead/final girl, there’s a potentially interesting turn involving her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), but it happens out of the blue, with some development this element might have been much more effective. The friend group is filled out with the asshole (Dylan McTee as Adam), the brain (Emma Dumont as Milla) and a gay couple (Vardaan Arora and Adrian Favela as Gary and Luis). These performances, and Matthew Modine’s, are fine and a more diverse cast where that diversity is treated largely as a given rather than a plot point is welcome, but that’s not to say that any of the characters has much of a personality. Like the small plot turn with Darius, Jen’s switch to badass for the film’s final act isn’t very well developed, and there’s no reason that two or three minutes couldn’t be spent to build up her sudden Lara Croft level prowess with a bow and arrow.
Behind the camera, Mike P Nelson delivers what's needed. An early sequence with a tree trunk rolling down a hill is well-executed, and the violence is made to feel brutal without always dwelling on detail that might betray what was likely not the biggest of budgets. The aftermath, however, particularly a couple of wince-inducing caved-in heads, is appropriately nasty. Like the screenplay, the direction doesn’t do anything wildly original, but it at least subverts a few expectations an audience might have of this film, and supplies the ingredients demanded of it in a way that is somewhat filling, if not especially nutritious.
Overall, Wrong Turn 2021 is probably the beneficiary of my floor level expectations. It’s at least trying to do something new; sure, it’s just remixing a bunch of elements we’ve seen before, but it has chosen elements we wouldn’t expect from this series. In a lot of ways, it does exactly what it sets out to do; injecting new impetus into a franchise by bringing some different ideas and elements to it. With deeper characterisation and a bit more motivation for the way certain things proceed I might have gone for a higher grade, but this is a perfectly entertaining way for a horror fan to pass some time, no more, but certainly no less.
★★★
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