Mortal Kombat1995
101 minutes
rated PG-13
Available from Warner Home Video on April 19th.
by Scott Mendelson
Mortal Kombat is very much a product of its time and place. It remains a time capsule of the mid-90s era when pre-established properties were slowly becoming the big thing in the wake of the Batman series, but hadn't yet fully taken over as they would after 2001 (there's a LONG essay about that coming soon-ish). It is odd to refer to a violent kung-fu fantasy based on an ultraviolent video game as 'charming', but Mortal Kombat remains, nearly sixteen years later, an amusing and nostalgia-filled trip to our youth. It remains one of the more successful films ever based on a video game, both artistically (for whatever that's worth) and commercially (at $70 million in domestic grosses, it trails only the first animated Pokemon movie, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time and Tomb Raider in the video game genre). It is not 'good' by most definitions, but by god it felt good to kick back and remember a time when a movie like this was just a B-movie genre entry in late summer, rather than a $200 million tentpole with an entire studio at peril. Like Street Fighter: the Movie, Mortal Kombat is a dumb, fun B-movie back when B-movies weren't being given A+ budgets and expectations.
