10 Recent Movie Characters Who Totally Deserved Better

Though the Mortal Kombat reboot wasn't a great movie, it at least captured enough of the IP's grisly essence to deliver a moderately entertaining video game adaptation.

Its big, gaping flaw, however, was in centering the story around an original character, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), who effectively serves as a totally pointless "audience surrogate," complete with a wife and daughter not a single Mortal Kombat fan cared about.

Lewis Tan tried to bring life to Cole, but the fundamental issue is that Cole effectively took the place that should've been naturally afforded to Mortal Kombat's de facto protagonist, Liu Kang (Ludi Lin).

Though Ludi Lin was well-cast as Kang, the character takes far too much of a back seat throughout the film, relegated to a supporting role when he should have been kicking ass up front.

Compare this Liu Kang to the one from Paul W.S. Anderson's Mortal Kombat movies and it's just no contest: he was the inarguable protagonist of those films, while played with impressive intensity by the great Robin Shou.

We get some cool moments with Kang here, but not nearly enough to satisfy fans of the series, which is what this film should've been striving to do in every single fiber of its being.