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.