It’s delicate work, taking your movie very, very seriously while also fitting in every vital reference to a video game full of creatively grisly deaths. But the trailer for the upcoming Mortal Kombat film does its level best to feature everything you could ask for, including, of course, someone seriously intoning the name of the film. Also there’s a weirdly hilarious conversation about birthmarks.
Here’s the extremely brief official summary, because what do you really need to know besides “there are many tough people and they are going to fight a lot”?
MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is unaware of his heritage—or why Outworld’s Emperor seeks to hunt him down. Cole finds sanctuary under Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and prepares to stand with Earth’s greatest champions against the enemies of Outworld in a high-stakes battle for the universe. Will Cole be able to unleash his arcana in time to stop the Outworld once and for all?
This latest cinematic incarnation of the video game comes from first-time feature director Simon McQuid. The screenwriters and story creators include Dave Callahan (a co-writer on Wonder Woman 1984) and Oren Uziel, who wrote The Cloverfield Paradox. Neither of those movies make a lot of sense, but the good thing about Mortal Kombat is that it doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to have a lot of fight sequences that reference the game, and of course it needs to have Sub-Zero create a dagger out of frozen blood. Mission accomplished.
Mortal Kombat arrives on HBO Max on April 16th.
