Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Mixed Reviews” with a minor in “Turn into a mortal and your haircut is free!”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype tonight’s screening of the sequel to 1995’s Supercult Classic Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation!
Look, I think we can agree that the first Mortal Kombat film was fun but was too much of a fence-sitter of a film. Not only was it a PG-13 film based on the most notoriously violent game in video game history, but it had about as much plot and visual effects polish as the game it was based on. It was neither good enough for film audiences nor extreme enough for fans of the video game. Nevertheless, the film made bank. From a modest budget of $18 million, Mortal Kombat grossed $122 million worldwide. The Gods of Hollywood demanded a sequel and, well, I think you’ll be glad to hear that the 1997 sequel did absolutely nothing to solve the problems of the original. It just made more.
Released in 1997, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation steals the plot from Mortal Kombat 3 and the character roster from Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, hoping to cater more to fans of the video game. Producer Lawrence Kasanoff who produced the previous Mortal Kombat film and would later go on to write, direct, and producer Foodfight! (Yes, THAT Foodfight!) said that he was trying to make the film “even more spectacular than the first movie… Our theme for the sequel is to shoot for more—more fights, more special effects, more Outworld, more everything.” It’s true. The film has more of pretty much everything. More fights strung together with little to no connecting plot. More dropped plot threads and character arcs such as Liu Kang’s partially completed Animality trials. More characters uttering more nonsense one-liners with more campy melodramatic flair than you have ever heard in a single film! And even more shoddy special effects and matte effects that make you question what decade the film was made in. Oh yeah, and the damn thing is still a pansy PG-13!
Many of the original cast from the first Mortal Kombat film reprise their roles including Robin Shou as Liu Kang, Talisa Soto as Kitana, and uh…no wait, that’s it. Nearly everyone attached to the first film could see where this whole ‘Movies based on Video Games’ thing was headed and escaped with what little of their careers were still intact. Says here that Linden Ashby was asked to return as Johnny Cage but then turned it down after reading the script. Even our boy Christopher Lambert, from Supercult Classic Highlander, who played Raiden in the original film jumped ship and had to be replaced with James Remar, an arguably better actor who is given even less to work with script-wise than his predecessor. The overhauled cast had to not only learn how to somehow turn dialogue copy-pasted from a bad cartoon show into drama while sprinting through dozens of fight scenes. The only thing going for it cast-wise might be that behind the scenes working as the stunt double for Robin Shou was a 20-something Tony Jaa, veteran Muay Tai fighter since childhood and future star of Supercult Classic Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, the most real martial arts film ever.
But let’s get real: Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was panned by both critics and fans of the video game. It is one of the lowest rated movies on IMDB with a score of 3.8 out of 10 right alongside Jaws 3-D (1983), Dungeons & Dragons (2000), and Supercult Classic Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). It has a staggering 2% on Rotten Tomatoes and even video game programmer and Mortal Kombat co-creator, and the original voice of the Motal Kombat announcer Ed Boon hated the film’s guts. But worst of all, it barely made its money back, grossing only a third of the box office returns of its predecessor on nearly double the budget. Reception was so bad that plans for a third Mortal Kombat film, called Mortal Kombat: Devastation, were abruptly cancelled. But take heart fellow Supercultists. The Mortal Kombat rights are now with Warner Bros. and there are plans for a 2021 reboot. Ahh, the Elder Gods continue to bless Supercult with an unending supply of fodder, don’t they?
Now adays its hard to tell whether Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is a cautionary tale of corporate greed and early video game cash-ins, or if it has evolved into a hilarious cult hit that plays into its own unintentional comedy. Is it a really bad video game film, or a really good spoof of the source material? It’s time to decide supercultists! Round One! FIGHT!
Supercult West is proud to present, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation!
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