Okay
@Mike, finished that. It is in fact a piece of shit. I wasn't misremembering.
Just to get them out of the way, the pros basically amount to one fairly good action scene (Sonya and Jax vs Cyrax) and several hot girls. In fact, I have a friend who, ANY TIME this movie is brought up, he makes a point to say that he thinks this bitch:
Is hotter than Bridgette Wilson:
I do not agree, but she's not a bad looking girl in her own right.
But yeah, that's pretty much it. One good action sequence and some hotties. That's all the good stuff. The end.
As for the bad stuff, well, it's everything else. Everything else in the movie is bad.
The effects range in quality from good enough to goddamned terrible. I mean, some of it legitimately looks fine and then some of it just looks SO BAD, as if they ran out of money before they could finish the effects for the film.
Also, the costumes look cheap as fuck and legit look like something they picked up at Walgreens during Halloween. Whenever there is a change from the first film in the costume design from the original film, the design in the original film is superior.
Take for instance Sub-Zero, a stone cold killer in the original movie:
By the time we get to Annihilation, he's lost his mask and he's walking around having conversations with people and shit:
That's just poor decision making.
I also think that a lot of the problem is that a lot of the stuff from the game just doesn't translate well to film. Take this bitch with four arms, for instance:
Maybe you can make that work in the game, but it just looks kind of retarded in a movie like this. Same goes for the centaur guy. The thing about the first film is that the characters are clearly fantasy characters, but other than Goro they all still feel relatively grounded in reality. They are basically just humans with special abilities.
Take all of the above, and wrap it up into a story that does not flow and just is not interesting, and what you have is a failure of a movie.
The first film was a cool and fun fantasy twist on the "tournament movie" concept. It was basically Bloodsport or Enter the Dragon, but in the world of Mortal Kombat, and it worked. I think that with this film they didn't think they could just rehash the tournament concept but at the same time they weren't really sure where to go with it. And the end result is this movie, which is unfortunate.
For the record, according to the IMDB trivia, Paul WS Anderson, Robin Shou and game co-creator Ed Boon are all on record as saying they dislike this film. And Anderson has said he wished that he had stayed involved with the franchise so that he could've shepherded it to a better place.