10 Wildly Underrated Action Movies Of The 90s

If you liked playing the Mortal Kombat games, you couldn't not love the movie. It was incredibly faithful to the video game series, and remains one of the smoothest transitions from game-to-movie ever made.

That said, of course it's ridiculous and over-the-top and stuffed full of painfully obvious one-liners. Because it's a video game adaptation that features a six-armed monster and soul-sucking sorcerer hosting an inter-dimensional martial arts tournament to determine the fate of Earth. So...yeah.

Despite this, Mortal Kombat isn't as painfully shallow or kitschy as the Street Fighter or Double Dragon adaptations. The supernatural backstory gives the film some appropriately dark edges, which interplays nicely with the gritty-but-surreal landscapes that Liu Kang and his cohorts do battle on.

Is the acting top notch? Absolutely not. Are some of the philosophical notes a little heavy-handed? You betcha. But the film is a visual feast, the fight choreography is impeccable, and the characters are actually allowed substantial backstories that give us a reason to cheer them on aside from blind nostalgia.

Also, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was quite possibly birthed solely so he could one day grow up to play Shang Tsung. It's just uncanny.