Previously on Mortal Kombat: I’m not a deeply invested fan — even “fan” might be an overstatement — but I’ve dabbled in the franchise. Back in my fast-food management days, after closing time a friend and I would hang out at a local 24-hour grocery that had a Mortal Kombat II cabinet by the front doors. Their overnight crew ignored us while we virtually whaled on each other for a while. I learned the moves for Liu Kang and Jax, just barely enough to get by, but I was never a serious threat. Years later I saw the first live-action MK film on VHS -– Paul W.S. Anderson’s primitive directorial debut that should’ve been irredeemably terrible. It bunny-hopped over the low bar of “better than most direct-to-video martial-arts schlock” for its time. I may have even laughed once or twice at intentionally funny parts. Obviously one game plus one B-movie doesn’t quite add up to MK geek-cred.

I didn’t bother with TV-commercial director Simon McQuoid’s 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot in its COVID-era release. Reviews weren’t encouraging, but audiences — not at the American box office, but somewhere out there — apparently plunked down just enough quarters to continue the game anyway. I would’ve ignored Mortal Kombat II just as hard if the trailers hadn’t thrown in a new, confusing element that begged the question: what is Karl Urban doing in there? Curiosity got the best of me. I even prepped for the occasion by watching the last film (streaming on Max), mostly regretted it, and committed to letting the sequel pummel me on the big screen, for better or worse.

Really, though: Karl Urban? Eomer? Billy Butcher? Skurge? Dr. McCoy? Judge Dredd? THAT Karl Urban?

The Gist: When last we left Our Heroes, MK2021 introduced the basic lore, which I didn’t remember and maybe never learned: reality comprises multiple dimensions, such as Earthrealm (i.e., Earth, duh), Outworld (i.e., Dormammu’s Dark Dimension), and, er, uh, And The Rest. They send any fighters who possess the right qualifying magic tattoos to compete in regular interdimensional “Mortal Kombat” tournaments. If one dimension loses ten times, the winner gets to take them over…and Earthrealm was already down by 9. McQuoid marshaled the sides, within minutes they fight and fight and fight. That was it, that was the film. They didn’t even get to the tournament. The two color-swapped super-ninja Subzero and Scorpion shared a backstory (“HELLO! I AM SCORPION! YOU KILLED MY FAMILY! PREPARE TO DIE!”), I recognized some characters’ finishing moves, and I understand hardcore MK fandom didn’t warm up to Lewis Tan — star of the one (1) good fight scene in Marvel’s Iron Fist — as its main character Cole Young, a Chosen One with the power of Wakandan vibranium armor, who was newly invented for the film and wasn’t even a playable character.

Our incoming screenwriter, Moon Knight showrunner Jeremy Slater, enforces at least some story structure this time. MK2021 ended with Cole planning to go recruit one of the biggest OG MK fighters they left out, the Hollywood glamour-boy Johnny Cage. That’s where Urban comes in, but Cage’s cheesy career and Main Character days are behind him. He’s a boozy has-been trying to sell off crates of unsold DVDs at comic-cons instead of just autographing 8×10 photos — no manager, no volunteer, no one in line to meet him. One night our old pals Liu Kang (Ludi Lin, an Aquaman head minion) and Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano! a.k.a. Hogun! and from Shogun!) pop up and induct him into the IP. Cage’s annoyed disbelief is palpable over the next two hours as he protests that stuntmen did all his work for him, and yet somehow his nonexistent action-hero reflexes awaken anyway and have him pinwheeling all over the place. Even if he weren’t good enough and did get killed, it might not matter anyway.

Cage is definitely not a Chosen One, and he’s not even the sole headliner. MKII introduces at least two more dimensions: Netherrealm (i.e., Hell but with open borders) and Edenia (i.e., Earth Fantasy Novel About Oppressed Serfs), where we meet another major player-character omitted from the last film: Adeline Rudolph (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) is Kitana, wielder of dual razor-fans and adopted daughter of Edenia’s colossal tyrant Shao Kahn (F9 head goon Martyn Ford). Her backstory takes a while to age forward, rev up and switch sides (“HELLO! I AM KITANA! YOU KILLED MY FAMILY! PREPARE TO DIE!”), but eventually gets there, with or without the help of her childhood BFF Jade (fellow Sabrina vet Tati Gabrielle).

Big-bad Shao Kahn naturally wants more than Edenia. He wants ALL the dimensions. This time the tournament is on, magic floating crystals are keeping score, and Earthrealm’s fate hangs in the balance! IT HAAAS BEGUUUN! AGAIN!

(Sidebar: why isn’t it spelled “Shao Khan”? Does spelling it “Kahn” like the hot dog brand really make him cooler?)

The familiar faces: Also surviving MK2021 and returning for round two are Jessica McNamee (The Meg) as Sonya Blade, alleged Special Forces veteran; Mehcad Brooks (The CW’s Supergirl) as robot-armed Jax; and Chin Han (American Born Chinese, The Dark Knight) as electric elder Shang Tsung.

Those who didn’t survive but return anyway — as the trailers already revealed — include the great Hiroyuki Sanada (Shogun, John Wick: Chapter 4, lots more) as Scorpion, stuntman Max Huang as the buzzsaw-hatted Kung Lao, and St. Denis Medical‘s Josh Lawson as Kano, the laser-eyed lunkhead who had to carry all the comic-relief weight but this time cheerfully shares it with Urban.

Cast members whose characters didn’t survive and are dead-dead for good, but who return here anyway, include Damon Herriman (Justified, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Charles Manson) as the necromancer Quan Chi; and Joe Taslim (The Raid, Star Trek Beyond) as, uh, I guess he’s kindasorta reincarnated, but not, but maybe so? He’s soaking in lore.

For the superfans out there, MK co-creator Ed Boon cameos as a bartender.

The Impressions: Sure, any “plot” is inessential, the rules are made-up and the points don’t matter, but martial arts popcorn-flicks live or die on their fight quality. More often than not, the sequel perpetuates MKII‘s weaksauce reliance on over-editing its duels Taken-style — every single bodily movement is julienne-sliced into its own split-second cut, and then cuts are glued together in packets of 100. It’s a dull way to cover for actors who can’t handle extensive choreography and/or papier-mache dozens of poor takes together into a single mediocre cutscene. McQuoid manages exactly one truly phenomenal throwdown — an aerodynamic spectacle between Liu Kang and Zombie Kung Lao lavished with longer cuts, wilder VFX, prettier desktop-PC wallpaper rotating behind them, and a finishing move for the ages.

I’m sure those backdrops are from the games, but I wouldn’t know, because whenever I’m fighting for my life in a gaming world, I cannot gaze toward the horizon or look for shapes in the clouds while I’m frantically button-mashing. Some battlefields are practical; some, CGI regurgitation. Netherrealm’s floor-is-lava aesthetic is a murky, vertiginous mess with no defined space, just the Hell of Spawn with more load-bearing columns. Occasional fun bubbles up through those cracks — to wit: so, so many finishing moves! Oh, the fatalities I was reminded of from three decades ago! No “Babalities” or “Friendship” moves come up, but they had to save something for the next sequel. And one imbalanced duel actually shows what happened to a defeated opponent every time I didn’t press the right combo fast enough for a fatality. Ah, memories.

If you simply want punching and kicking for the sake of it, here some is. But absent any scintillating personalities, two cardboard cutouts putting up their dukes has to be really spectacular if we’re to care about the outcome without any investment in either combatant. That’s even truer when the outcome is irrelevant: between the necromancer’s presence and reality’s thin walls, death is just another dimension and basically doesn’t matter (see also: Big Two superhero comics). A more inventively built world might pretend they’re riffing on arcade mechanics and the extra lives we bought with every shiny quarter, but there’re no clever clues implying anyone thought that cleverly about it (and Scott Pilgrim already aced that joke anyway).

And yet, we also find oases of relief between fights. Whenever Kitana’s grimdark origin story is on time-out, the best parts are any and all tag-team verbal sparring between Johnny Cage and Kano. In MK2021 Lawson’s snarky-dude shtick bugged me till I realized he was the only actor who understood the assignment; MKII welcomes his return-to-form and finally gives him a scene partner willing to meet him jab-for-jab. (Their best squabble is capped with a Lord of the Rings reference.) Urban also sparks a bit more brightly in the second half when latecomer CJ Bloomfield (a Furiosa biker minion) arrives in animated headgear as the quasi-demonic bruiser Baraka and invites a different dynamic from Urban.

As for Johnny Cage on his own: Urban tries to make the most of the bons mots he’s given and dutifully evolves from world-weariness into…well, into caring just barely enough about anyone’s survival besides his own. Repurposing his Dr. McCoy accent, he never quite goes full Billy Butcher macho-madman, partly because he doesn’t have any superpowers for most of the film. The magic tattoos, whose existence and rules were important to MK2021 (uh, until they weren’t), are out of the picture. When the time comes to be the hero and save the day and graduate to a real live Mortal Kombatant, I’m unclear if I was supposed to belly-laugh when Cage’s catalyst is revealed as [dramatic pause] The Power of Hollywood!

Once again crawling over an extremely low bar, Mortal Kombat II is slightly better than the last one (well, maybe not for Cole Young fans) but still not as fun as playing one of the games yourself. Then again, the fighters here last a lot longer than if someone had handed me a controller, so for me this’ll have to do.

Also not helping their case: at our showing the trailers included the upcoming Street Fighter reboot. I’ve never played nor watched anything involving that IP (not even the Van Damme flop), but it looks sixty IQ points stupider and more fun.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Mortal Kombat II end credits, but we do get a complete, updated version of “Techno Syndrome”, a.k.a. The Theme From Mortal Kombat, with more character names shouted out than in the original.

Also, among the foremen allocated to numerous departments, one such subset is misspelled “formen”. I forget which domain was theirs — maybe they were in charge of kombat klean-up.