New Movie Review: Mortal Kombat

Is Mortal Kombat really a horror movie?  Technically, no.  But it's a gory, bloody action film with supernatural elements and some horror-esque monsters, and horror sites all around the web are covering it.  Plus, it's really fun, so I just want to review it.  The movie came out on April 23 on HBO Max and in movie theaters, and I've been really looking forward to it ever since the trailer came out about two months ago.  I was a huge fan of the first three Mortal Kombat games as a kid, and even though I haven't been a gamer for over ten years, the franchise still holds a special place in my heart.

The premise of this movie is simple.  It exists in a world filled with multiple realms, and there's one in particular, called Outworld, that wants to invade earth.  However, they can't just bring their army and attack the way you see in most movies.  No, there are rules for this sort of thing, so to invade another realm, Outworld has to win ten straight Mortal Kombat tournaments.  Each tournament pits the best fighters of both realms against each other, and Outworld is currently on a nine-tournament win streak against earth.  If they win the next one, they can finally take it as their prize.

The situation is pretty dire, so humanity's champions have to do their best to defeat their enemies and stop Outworld from taking over their world.  Interestingly, though, this film isn't actually about the tournament.  Instead, it's kind of like a prequel.  Outworld is sending assassins to kill off all of earth's best fighters, so the good guys have to band together and make sure they survive until the tournament can actually start.  It's an interesting concept, and I think it works.  It sets the film apart from the first Mortal Kombat movie from 1995, and it gives the franchise some room to breathe and to build up the story more than they could in just a single film (assuming that this one gets some sequels).

So what did I think of the movie?  Like I said before, it's super fun, and that's hands down its biggest strength.  It has some really great fights, and just about all of them feature the violence and blood the video games are known for.  If you're a fan of gory martial arts action with a few superpowers thrown in, then you're going to enjoy the fights in this movie.

On top of those awesome fights, the film also does a great job of bringing to life some of the most iconic characters from the video games.  They look and feel just like the characters I remember playing as and against about twenty-five years ago, so if you're a Mortal Kombat fan, you're going to get a huge kick out of seeing beloved favorites like Liu Kang, Raiden, Goro, and Sub-Zero do their thing.

If you're not already a fan of the franchise, it's tough for me to say how I think you'll react to the characters, but I can say one thing.  Since I only played the first three games, and since I played them so long ago, I don't remember all the little details about the mythology, so there were a bunch of things in this movie that were new to me.  But I still really enjoyed all the lore in it even when I didn't remember it from my gaming days, so I suspect that there might be enough here for non-fans to enjoy as well.

All that being said, I have to admit that as much fun as I had with this movie, it's far from perfect.  In fact, I'd probably even go so far as to say that it's more of a fun movie than a good movie.  It's very, very flawed.  Most notably for me, a bunch of the dialogue was pretty cringe-worthy.  The film tried to incorporate some of the most famous phrases from the video games, like "flawless victory" and "finish him," but they often come out feeling very cheesy and out of place.  To take just one example, there's a shot in the trailer where the character Kano wins a fight and then says "Kano wins," and in the trailer it's really cool.  But when you see it in the movie, it doesn't make much sense.  The filmmakers tried a bit too hard on that front, and the end result probably would've been better if they had just left those lines out of the script.

On a more "big picture" note, even though I really enjoyed seeing some of my favorite Mortal Kombat characters brought to life, they're not exactly great examples of narrative complexity and nuance.  The vast majority of them, especially the Outworld forces, are pretty one-dimensional, and the same is true of the story as a whole.  There's simply not much substance behind it.  It basically just serves as an excuse to showcase the cool fights, so in that sense, it's kind of like the plot of the recent Godzilla vs Kong.  If you're looking for deep metaphorical meanings or a shining example of the fine art of cinema, you're not going to find it here.  This movie is all about having fun, so if you go into it wanting anything more than that, you're going to be disappointed.

But if you're OK with that, you're going to have a really good time with this film.  It has awesome action, really cool characters, and all the blood and gore that I remember from when I used to put in the "blood code" in the very first Mortal Kombat game on Sega Genesis.  It hit all the right nostalgia buttons for me, so while I wish the story were a bit deeper, I'm not disappointed at all.  On the contrary, I just got done watching it on HBO Max, and I can't wait to go to the theater in a few days and see it again.

New Movie Review: The Unholy

The Unholy is a new supernatural horror movie that came out in theaters on April 2, and it's about a Catholic girl who supposedly sees visions of the Virgin Mary.  Through her, "Mary" brings a message of absolute faith and devotion, and she wins over a multitude of followers with some pretty incredible healings.  However, as with all horror movies, the truth behind these apparitions is much darker than anyone imagines.  The girl isn't really seeing the Virgin Mary.  Instead, she's actually being visited by the spirit of a woman who pledged herself to Satan almost 200 years prior, and this evil ghost is planning to use the girl to steal people's souls.

As a Catholic myself, I'm a big fan of Catholic-themed horror, and I was intrigued by the premise of this movie.  While we've seen plenty of films about hauntings and possessions, I can't think of a single one about apparitions of the Virgin Mary.  It's a really unique angle, so I was interested to see how the film would handle the topic.

But unfortunately, The Unholy does a really bad job with it.  It takes just about the most boring approach possible to this refreshing idea, the characters are almost all just bland stereotypes, and the scares are super generic.  On top of all that, the story is also a very thinly veiled attack on the Catholic faith, so as a Catholic, I had an especially bad time with it.

To see what I mean, let's take each of those elements one by one, starting with the story.  Going into the movie, I was expecting it to set up a mystery about whether or not the girl's apparitions were genuine.  I thought it would start out with the girl experiencing her visions and gaining followers, and we wouldn't know right away if she was legit.  Maybe it would give a few subtle hints here and there that something wasn't quite right, but it would let us stew in the mystery for a good while before letting us know the truth.

That could've made for a great story, but it's not at all what happens.  Instead, the film completely kills the mystery before it even starts, sapping the narrative of any intrigue it might've had.  From the very first scene, it tells us that there's nothing divine about these apparitions.  "Mary" is really just an evil demon or ghost, and the movie reminds us of that multiple times before any of the characters realize it.  So instead of getting a compelling narrative that keeps us guessing, we get a very by-the-numbers story that unfolds pretty much exactly how we expect it to.

Now, a lot of good horror movies have very pedestrian plots, but they make up for it with great scares and likeable characters, so this doesn't automatically mean The Unholy is a bad film.  But unlike those other movies, this one doesn't have anything to balance out its boring plot.  Take the characters, for instance.  Like I said before, they're mainly just bland stereotypes, so you can easily pigeonhole them after about five seconds of screen time.  For example, there's the conman journalist who ends up not being so bad after all, there's the unscrupulous bishop who's willing to hide the truth just so his people will believe, and there's the seer who simply accepts that her visions are divine without any question whatsoever.  Those are all just variations of standard character types we've seen a million times before, and pretty much everybody else in the film is like that too.

Next, when we turn to the scares, they're just as bad as the characters.  The Unholy suffers from the same problem that a lot of mainstream horror has these days: it has one decently creepy scene, but other than that, it's pretty much all jump scares.  The movie doesn't do anything new or creative in this area, so in addition to being a bad movie in general, it's also a bad horror movie in particular.

And finally, we have the very thinly veiled attack on the Catholic faith.  Once the characters realize that the girl is actually communicating with an evil spirit and not the Virgin Mary, they still call this spirit "Mary," so the film becomes all about the dangers of praying to Mary, believing in Mary, being devoted to Mary, and a bunch of other things that sound a bit too similar to genuine Catholic devotion to the mother of Jesus.  It's like the movie goes out of its way to describe this demonic pseudo-spirituality in almost the exact same way that we Catholics describe our devotion to Mary, and after a while, the message becomes too obvious to miss.  I'm not normally one to find anti-Catholic sentiment in movies or TV shows, but even I can't deny that its present in this film.

All that being said, I have to be fair and let you know that The Unholy isn't entirely terrible.  There is one good thing about it: the acting.  While the characters were bland, several of the performances (especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the deceitful journalist who ends up being the hero) were good enough that I at least enjoyed seeing the actors act.

But in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't nearly enough to save The Unholy.  While it may not be the worst movie I've seen all year, I definitely don't recommend checking it out.  The bland characters, uninteresting story, generic scares, and anti-Catholic theme outweigh the good things many times over, so if you're looking for some exciting new horror, you won't find it here.