6/10 It’s been said too often by too many people that there has never been a good cinematic video game adaptation – too often and by too many people because that isn’t true. There are plenty of perfectly enjoyable video game movies. Max Payne is a personal favorite, Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider are at least good enough to be thought of as movie franchises now, and Detective Pikachu and Rampage have delighted in recent years.
Much of this impression is rooted in the mid-90s, when the first generation of arcade rats were coming into adulthood and movies were first being made to cater to them, and New Line Cinema released Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, two of the most reviled movies ever made. The crowd of people who prefer video games to movies anyway took these low-quality offerings as a personal slight, and they haven’t stopped complaining about it for a quarter century.
Now it’s 2021, and with New Line Cinema still in charge, though it’s owned by Warner Bros. now, and the third Mortal Kombat movie, which was conceived as a sequel but took so long to get off the ground they reworked it as its own franchise starter, has finally hit theater and computer screens, and it’s a blast.
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