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.
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.