Mortal Kombat is an awful film that we only love because of nostalgia.
While I'd probably rather watch MK over any other video game film, I don't actually want to watch it again, ever.
The word "great" should not be used to describe this movie.
One question that has always interested me is why Mortal Kombat succeded where Street Fighter the Movie failed. Certainly Raul Julia and his performance are leagues above every other actor in both films.
Maybe it was that soundtrack...
"The soundtrack went
Platinum[3] in less than a year reaching No. 10 on the
Billboard 200"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat:_Original_Motion_Picture_Soundtrack
I was 10 in 95, aka "Prime Target Audience" for Mortal Kombat aka "Highly Susceptible To Edgelord Music Influence" and I definitely had a copy. One of my earliest CD's, IIRC.
We talking about Mortal Kombat again? I'm talking about Mortal Kombat again.
Comparing it to Street Fighter is like comparing apples to oranges. Mortal Kombat embraced its video game roots while Street Fighter largely did not.
For instance, who are the "main heroes" of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat in the games? It's Ryu and Liu Kang. I remember reading up on the adaptations of the games and how Mortal Kombat's director and writers fought hard to have an Asian lead hero. It's not some white American who saves the day in Mortal Kombat, and that's something most Hollywood movies - even TODAY - struggle with when adapting properties focused on Asian leads. Street Fighter, meanwhile, made Ryu and Ken secondary con artists that were there to fill out the film's character quota, with Guile taking center stage.
Street Fighter also never really played anything straight. It was goofy, campy, silly, and ridiculous from the get-go, which isn't altogether bad but... SF needed SOME moments to be legitimately straight. It didn't help that there actually existed a far superior, far better adaptation of the source material created a few months prior.
The Street Fighter II: Animated Movie is to video game anime adaptations what Mortal Kombat was to video game film adaptations. It's stylish, exciting, and a great balance of taking the material both seriously while indulging in its most over-the-top elements. It's supremely faithful to the roots of the game and, just like Mortal Kombat, was influential enough that elements of the adaptation were integrated into future games.
The Mortal Kombat movie did that where the Street Fighter movie failed. The cast chemistry was much better, the cinematography was much better, the soundtrack was iconic, the fight choreography remains great, the pacing is solid, the tone is ridiculously fun while the villains actually remain threatening and memorably surreal.
While the CGI has dated the film, it's not just nostalgia. It holds up in the same way films like Big Trouble in Little China do. As a video game adaptation, yeah, it's legit great, and its best quality is that even if you know absolutely nothing about the games, the film gets you up to speed and gives you a good time that provides the same feeling so many of us got playing the games at the time.
I'll never forget the theater erupting into cheers when the MK theme kicked in, or the laughs at Cage's one-liners, or the fist-pumps whenever a good fatality hit the screen ("give me a break", "Okay", *snap*). It was the rare film that both casual audiences AND fans of the games both enjoyed in equal measure.
That's still almost unheard of in video game adaptations.
