John R. Leonetti

Most video game adaptations to the big screen leave much to be desired. The original Mortal Kombat film turned out to be a pleasant surprise and went on to great commercial success, with hordes of theater goers chanting, "Fatality!" and "Finish him!" Yet the producers of this sequel apparently ignored the reasons for the first film's success in crafting this bumbling follow-up film.
What's wrong? Chiefly that the film is entirely targeted at an audience of less than nine years of age. One show more reason the first film brought in so much money was that it became a cult success amongst high school and college students who had played the games, yet MK: Annihilation simply disregards that audience. Another problem is that the film tries to do too much by trying to show or at least mention every single character from the game, which ends up leaving many plot threads dangling (what ever happened to the good Sub-Zero, who promises his aide to the heroes only to never be seen again?)

The film picks up right where the last one left off, but immediately Johnny Cage is killed (OK, it happened in the game, too), Raiden is stripped of his immortal powers, and the Earth is being overrun by the invading hordes of bad guys (most of the latter occurs off-screen). Characters seem to come and go as the heroes fight to save the Earth, many seemingly inserted only because they appear in the game and only bloating the cast with no real impact on the plotline.

The film concludes with some seriously poor claymation of "animalities," a concept plucked from the game where the fighters become their symbollic animal. Finally the film draws to a conclusion!

There are many things the producers could have done to improve the film, from diverging slightly from the game's storyline while keeping the concepts ("Fatality!", etc.) intact to examining the interesting plots of the MK television series. In many ways the movie is just like a video game, only you as the viewer don't get to control one of the characters.

That aside, the DVD does include some nice features such as the "skip to a battle" navigation, and the movie does give a lot of good martial arts action. Maybe you'll enjoy it more than I or any of my friends did. show less