Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms (2021)

Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms (2021)

 

5/10

Starring the voices of:

Patrick Seitz

Jordan Rodrigues

Joel McHale

Jennifer Carpenter

 

Directed by Ethan Spaulding

 

I guess it’s the final countdown. The animation is R-rated and almost as bloody as Scorpion’s Revenge, but the fights aren’t as fun. In this iteration of the Mortal Kombat story, we have Earthrealm and Outworld agreeing on one final battle to end all battles. Here’s what I don’t get about the whole Mortal Kombat setup: what’s the point of Mortal Kombat if Shao Kahn can just ignore the rules and invade Earth? Which he did—and was doing a good job at—before deciding to hold a final Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat is a video game turned animation with numerous movies, but all of them stick to the same basic setting. Mortal Kombat was established by the elder gods as a way to merge worlds fairly. Shao Kahn lost in Scorpion’s Revenge (click to get more depth into the story), but he still invaded Earth. I was like, what’s the point of Mortal Kombat then? And why are the elder gods doing nothing to enforce the rules they set in place?

While this was going on, we have Shinnok working in the background. Now that his man, Quan Chi, has been killed, Shinnok is trying to merge some form of god together. The whole point of this endeavor is to undo all the realms the elder gods created.

The animation style is very similar to the previous movie, Scorpion’s Revenge, but the story isn’t as interesting. Unlike the nice fight settings and walkthrough battles in Scorpion’s Revenge, this movie mostly takes place in a pit-like arena. I hope the next Mortal Kombat movie doesn’t resort to this lazy approach.

We get to see some new characters from the games, but few of them really matter. The new Sub-Zero, the one we’re all used to from Mortal Kombat 2 onward, is here with his focus now set on getting revenge on Scorpion for killing his brother. So, we’ve got three stories running side by side, eventually merging at the center when it seems like all is well. Then, as you can guess, it isn’t.

I feel the whole idea of this new animation lost its footing the moment they decided to nullify the entire point of Mortal Kombat. I can forgive the games for doing that because they’re just fighting games. People like me don’t care much about the story or who killed whom in the main plot—we just want to grab the controller and fight.

They could’ve had Shao Kahn petition for a new tournament, tweak the rules a bit, and carry on from there. Instead, they made the first animation feel completely irrelevant.

Oh, and nice work on Liu Kang’s "level-up" moment (sarcasm). If Raiden knew the key to his power-up was “your parents loved you,” he should’ve just said that in the first animation instead of standing there and watching him almost die.