John Kendall

The problem with making the scene between Scorpion and Sub-Zero both your trailer and your opening scene, is that this movie feels like a bait-and-switch. Past that scene Sub-Zero becomes a tertiary character, Scorpion is a plot device, and we end up following some new character that we're given next to no reason to actually care about. The story is poorly constructed, much of the acting is stiff, and the dialogue frequently falls flat. Most of the fight scenes were good, but that's all the movie really has to bank on. Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Kano, and Jax are the best parts of the movie. You can't build a whole movie on good fight scenes alone. You need a coherent story and convincing characters to hold it together. If I want to watch a Mortal Kombat movie, I'll just rewatch the 1995 version or the 7 minute intro to this movie. If I want to watch violent fights and fatalities, I'll look up cutscenes from the games.

I honestly don't know how anyone rates this 5 stars. I never read the comics, and was coming into blindly. The show starts off intriguing enough, but drops off quickly after that. Almost none of the characters, good or bad, give us a reason to care about them. Their motivations often don't match the character. The only character worth watching is Ward Meachum. Writing is shallow and predictable. They speak a lot about Eastern philosophy, but no one in the show abides by it who should. Basically feels like it was written by some white guy who read a couple Wikipedia articles about Buddhism and Bushido. Fight scenes are forgettable, and there's a severe lack of the Iron Fist being the Iron Fist. And when they do use the Iron Fist there's just a whole lot of punching the ground. During one episode they briefly show a clip from a former Iron Fist defending K'un Lun and it's way better than anything else in the show. The show could have benefited a lot from being treated like a more light-hearted kung fu serial than the soap opera in devolves into. They fell into a trap of trying to match the gritty tone of Jessica Jones and Daredevil instead of letting it be its own thing. Unless you're a die-hard Marvel completionist, or have literally watched everything else on Netflix at least twice, skip this one.