Karl Urban's Johnny Cage dominated all the marketing. Liu Kang is repeatedly declared, throughout the film, to be "the best fighter we've got". So who defeats the big bad Shao Kahn in 1v1 combat and wins the day?
Kitana, of course! Who else? Get subverted, expectations!
Classic girl bossing aside, Mortal Kombat 2 was one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. My personal highlight was Liu Kang exiting the film like fucking Poochie from the Simpsons. I've never seen a lazier or more convoluted character extraction in my life. I highly recommend you seek out and watch his final scene. It's hilarious.
Anyways, MK2 inexplicably got a pass from all the usual anti-woke content creators. This just keeps happening. Someone like The Critical Drinker will give his stamp of approval to some new media, I'll take a chance on it, only to discover it has many of the same woke elements found in every other mainstream offering. I guess all these "based" YouTube reviewers got one-shot by Buffy when they were teenagers because none of them seem to mind a girl boss.
So two thumbs way down for the new Mortal Kombat movie.
I have not seen the movie, but your description checks out based on an article that popped up on the feed that I should have avoided but did not.
What was the article about? Kitana being a girlboss and defeating Shao Kahn as a symbol of female empowerment.
Yuck.
The article also stressed that the two leads -- her and Johnny Cage -- are played by actors who had never done martial arts in their life.
Yikes.
I readf another article about how nervous Karl Urban was for his first fight on set because he didn't know martial arts. I was thinking that there was no way this was going to turn out well.
This always results in disaster because it means you cannot have a clean master shot (i.e., a single wide-angle take of the entire choreographed fight that they use in editing to showcase the skill and technique -- regardless of what people think about the quality of the films, the John Wick movies use A LOT of master shots because Keanu did a lot of his own fight-stunts, which is part of what makes the choreography so impressive).
The reason a martial arts film wouldn't have many master shots is because they are actors, not martial artists. All of the actual technique are handled by stunt doubles, CGI, and editing.
I knew right there that meant either side characters, fast-motion cameras, and clever editing would have to do a LOT of the heavy lifting for the fight scenes in Mortal Kombat 2, opposite of the original 1995 Mortal Kombat film, which actually had really good fight choreography for the time, and that's because most of the leads did have a martial arts background.
Another good comparison film is Bloodsport. While Jean Claude said the original edit was a mess -- full of close-ups and fast-cuts -- he recut the film using mostly the master shots they took, and only did the close-ups where it made sense (he did the same thing when he had to re-edit Cyborg from the absolute disaster that Pyun put together, and anyone who has seen the director's cut will see JCVD's re-edit for the theatrical release was a masterpiece by comparison).
Sorry for the rant, but it just bothers me when they get actors for martial-arts focused films and then have to weasel around the fight scenes because the actors don't know martial arts.
That being said, Mortal Kombat 2 had the extra awfulness of being a woke film about female empowerment and revenge.
As an aside, if normies do end up liking it, then it will be another successful bit of subversion for elites, just like the movie Prey. More and more we're starting to see that woke is not dying, just evolving.
Prey is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. All the "grifters" came out in support of that one. I was legitimately confused while watching it myself. Some of the most egregious girl bossing I've ever seen. I guess that marks how successful the woke incursion into media really was; the new "return to normal" is just nonstop girl bosses instead of open degeneracy. Such victory.
To confirm: yes, all of Johnny Cage's fights are a confusing patchwork of frenetic edits. The only good fight scenes in the movie are between Liu Kang (martial artist) and either Kung Lao (martial artist) or Shao Kahn (athlete).
It's the classic normies right wing type of "conservatism". Regardless of medium or context (Hollywood, schools, music, societal practices, etc.), the subversives push subversion and degeneracy to 10, and then normalize it for a while. People increasingly cry fowl that everything's turned to crap, so then the subversives dial it back to 7. The normies cheer it as a victory. 7 becomes the new normal and is accepted by the normies. The subversives then pushel it to 17 and normalize it...
Repeat this process ad nauseum, and you get modern "conservatives", who defend the subversion and degeneracy in ever increasing incremental steps. Slowly, over time, however, there's an increasing population of people realizing what's going on and reject the entirety, or most, of the subversives push back to the beginning. These people are usually called far right, fascists, Nazis, and/or conspiracy theorists. They're (we're) called these names even by the normies conservatives who now actively defend the "dialed back" subversion and degeneracy.
Also, everyone alive today has been indoctrinated into this system of propaganda, which began before we were born. What people in their 30s and beyond, the normie conservatives, fail to realize is that their wish to go back to the "sane" times of their childhood is a mid point in this incremental increase of the subversion and degeneracy. To completely undo the subversion would require almost a complete dismantling and destruction of all current structures, behaviors, ideologies, and thought processes, to to back to a time before any of us were born.
I'd happily go back to the 1890s-1930s without a second thought. Electronic "entertainment" was a mistake.
They need to take lessons from sensei Steven Seagal, like: Using a body double for all the action scenes, using a body double for standing still so the hero looks more fit, taking shots of the hero ducking in a random place in the room and then playing them forwards, backwards and mirrored at least ten times total, overloading the viewer with a string of half-second cuts that only show limbs moving and replaying some of them more than twice...and my favorite, using CGI over a motorcyclist's helmet to make it look like the hero is wearing it.
Sounds like that 13 jump cut sequence of Liam Neeson jumping over a fence.
Now you're just making shit up.
There were plenty of people propping that film up. Even now, go into any normie forum and they are all salivating over that film; look up the user reviews, they can't get enough of it.
There was nowhere near enough lambasting for that film.
The Berserker Predator took out 30 French trappers with ease, but couldn't land a single hit on Naru. Every time I bring this up, the normies just kind of skirt around the issue.
Were there or are there any anti-woke channels out there that actually ripped that movie to shreds in the way that it deserved? I didn't see a lot of negativity aimned at that film like the Star Wars films, even though it was very much on par with them in terms of Naru being a girlboss.
Can’t help but share this:
Johnny Cage was actually based on JCVD in Bloodsport, and furthermore, MK was originally conceived of as a Bloodsport videogame adaptation. When they couldn’t get the license they pivoted to the more fantastical.
Imagine how much worse the world would be now if stingy Hollywood producers had just given them a license.
This is because none of them understand the fundamental problem; movies are subversive by design.
They seem to think that producers see movies as products and want to make money on them. Somehow the studios were "inflitrated" by wokies and that made everything bad.
No. The wokies were invited by the execs. They have the money and are spending it to undermine Western civilization. The "based critics" are looking at movies through the narrow lens of the art and industry in a vacuum. They seem unable to understand that the subversion of TV, movies, video games, music, comic books, and social media are the goal of a massive global conspiracy, not some random coincidence.
So when they see anything remotely based, they jump all over it because they want movies to be good, not understanding that pretty much the entire institution is now a tool for civilizational warfare.
I would agree with you, a lot of times someone like the critical drinker (who is a published author IRL) is critiquing all the story elements and cinematography from a technical point of view. I’ve noticed he goes out of his way to never use the word Woke, I used to think it was because he still hopes to become a serious film critic outside of YouTube and score more interviews with people like Russell Crowe, but these days I think it’s more because he’s so hyper focussed on being a film autist that he misses blatantly obvious things right in his face. He also said in his MK2 video that he was a massive fan of the franchise and Karl Urban (like a lot of the other anti-woke bros are), so maybe there was some personal bias that clouded his judgement.
He doesn't use woke but he does talk about "The Message" which is basically woke
Sure, and I appreciate the technical detail those guys go into. They obviously know a lot more than me about movies and the industry, but they are still operating under the impression that these terrible movies are a mistake and that clouds their judgement. They want the studios to make good movies again so they get their hopes up whenever there's the smallest hint that a movie isn't actually going to take a dump in their popcorn.
The same people are getting cast by the studios, which are still run by the same people. If a movie seems "based", it's only because they're trying to be subtle about it.
Yep, agreed
It's also possible that he's just human and not right 100% of the time.
Hollywood movies are.
It's a literal cartel.
The real problem is that the ending is stupid. Not that Kitana won. Apparently the rules of the tournament are so flexible that even after all declared fighters for Earth have been defeated (and the diegetic score keeper has shown all the Earth fighters have lost, meaning the bad guy wins) Kitana, a fighter on SK’s team just says “I lied, I’m on the other team.” And that’s allowed.
Such an insulting way to close the tournament.
The rest of the movie is a solid B.
That was the second dumbest part of the movie, for sure.
I remember a version of MK where Shang Tsung had to grant a wish to the winner of the tournament; it would have been such a simple way to fix the issue.
I like how they killed off their original character we were all supposed to root for.
That original character was why I sat out this movie. Good to hear he’s dead, but the fact they had him in the first place told me not to bother.
It is completely baffling to me that someone would drive through traffic, pay $15+, wait in line, then sit through 30 minutes of commercials, just to watch is obviously going to be a terrible movie in a room with a bunch of apes.
Are you just brain broken by nostalgia for glory days of theaters? It's over.
That's pretty much it. We miss "going to the movies with friends" instead of being isolated, atomized and worked to death in a gay brown zionist economic zone.
I think MK2 gets a pass because magic and source material.
Sub-zero isn't a strong character because he's a man, but because he can freeze people solid. A baby that could freeze people would be formidable.
The games had female characters that were on par with the men, so it's true to the source.
For these reasons I'd look at the proportion and how they fight. Three out of 12? fighters being women is a little much but not really bad. Half and half would be totally ridiculous.
As for fighting, in the original MK Sonya Blade gets in a few hits that are possible, but basically it's just strongman Kano smacks her in the head once and she's down like John Stossel, kicks her in the ribs and it looks fucking brutal - she's done. He could win at that point but he's playing with her. Then she gets a lucky one-hit kill that's justified by her better skills. In original MK Kano would win 99/100 fights with Sonya and that's why it works.
In modern girl boss she'll get clocked by a 300 lb muscle man and just shake it off like it was nothing. It's strength vs strength when it should be strength vs ability because that's the only way a female fighter could win.
Sure, but we all know that that's not why they would have written it this way in the movie.
Zero tolerance for this shit.
Also, Bridgette Wilson had zero physical presence, due to her complete lack of a shred of physical ability. And they put her in a leather bustier at the end of the movie.
Also Goro looked like a rubber suit instead of a real Goro.
Why? You just said magic exists, so someone with powers would be formidable no matter their stature, gender, age, whatever.
Not all the fighters have magic and magic doesn't trump everything else.
Without magic there should be zero women in any real championship.
She's over 10,000 years old and can teleport. Not all fighters have magic, but she certainly does. Magic may not always trump everything else, but it clearly does in some fights.
Cool. Not really relevant here, because in this world, there is magic. There are superhuman beings with overwhelming ability, strength, and pain tolerance. Some of them are women, and have powers that can defeat even the strongest fighters. It's why even if you pick Baraka, a massive mutant with blades coming out of his forearms, you still might lose to Cassie Cage, a normal human that can create forcefields.
It sounds like you're agreeing with everything I said.
If you agree there's a physical component to the battles, which obviously there is, then it shouldn't be 1:1 ratio.
Get your hearing checked then I guess.
The battles aren't solely physical. There's also factors of agility, pain tolerance, weaponry, and, yes magic. So there could theoretically be a 1:1 ratio because this is a magic world with teleporters and wormholes and alternate dimensions that make only biological strength all but irrelevant.
There's no reason why there shouldn't be a 1:1 ratio. Theoretically it could be all women if they were the only ones with magic. It's splitting hairs over a game that has shapeshifting monsters and demigods that can control sand.
Is there anything in the lore that says there a magic difference between women and men? No.
So you're inventing some hypothetical where you're right.
/golfclap
This is like peak reddit right here.
I was giving a hypothetical as an example my sweet illiterate child, not to say anything is right or wrong. There is no magic difference between women and men according to the lore, no. You still seem to be basing the supposed allowed ratio on the logic of the world you live in currently, instead of the fictional MK universe with magic.
Is there anything in the lore that says men should have a higher ratio of fighters in the tournament? No.
It was alright. Kitana did not act like a girl boss at all. She's a fighter in the games, what did you want her to do, sit back and look pretty? They portrayed her as accurate to the games and their lore as possible. I agree the movie was mostly dumb but it was not woke in the slightest.
You are exactly the type of person I'm talking about lol
Kitana stabs people with blade fans. Did the movie stick to that, or did it have her punching dudes?
Yes she used her fans. She was also outmatched by Shao Khan until his magical macguffin ran out of juice
She mostly uses the fans including a really cool fatality at the end.
I can't believe The Critical Drinker gave his stamp of approval for a girl boss movie. That is not like him.
He sometimes lets his hope get the better of him.
Mortal Kombat 2 was that movie that came out in 1997 or 1998.
Technically, that was Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Now let us never speak of it again
Raiden and Sonya's actor changes were the biggest downgrade in cinematic history.
But whatever made you think it was going to be good?
The first movie was so putrid it killed new movies for me, so at least it has that going for it.
Like was said elsewhere, these are actors and not martial artists. But in that case why is the acting such dog shit?
Kitana is a fierce fighter. Her winning a fight isn't "girlboss," because that's how it works in the MK universe.
I oughtta fall from heaven on your ass like lightning.
Drinker and the critical right suffer from the problem of: where their paycheck comes from.
If your paycheck comes from criticizing movies, then you must by default remain connected to the Matrix, and you must remain subservient to it to allow your checks to clear.
Critical Drinker and other content creators can’t detach from it, so they cannot overturn the table and state, “This media is made by my enemies, and is only accidentally made tolerable. Continuing to relate to this media is continuing to provide aid and comfort to those who hate me. I’m good, fuck off.”
Normie media reviewers love goyslop and will never give it up.
That's because he doesn't watch the movies.
TBF Kitana in mortal kombat is OP as fuck
And that's the problem. What used to be the standard way of living is now repackaged and sold to you as "nostalgia." As each successive generation believes less and less that it existed at all.
Anybody saying MK2 was woke or that Kitana was portrayed as a girlboss is either too retarded to watch movies or, more likely, just pasting sentences that somebody else who is too retarded to watch movies wrote. It was a much better movie than the first one.
Oh look, another one lol
"Here's why this particular girl boss makes total sense."
There were reasons for all of Rey's powers, too. Were you happy with girl boss star wars?
You are retarded.