How Mortal Kombat 2021 Gets EVERYTHING Wrong

4. Cole Young Is Pointless, And Bland As Hell

Studio writing 101 strikes again, as "well of course we need a blank slate character for the audience to connect to" is put centre stage.

That character in this case is Lewis Tan's Cole Young, a bland, vanilla fighter scraping by on the love of his daughter and wife. Cole's drive in the film - after he's abandoned Raiden's temple because he can't trigger his inner Arcana - is to give up and go home, only realising he does have what it takes after his family are directly threatened by Goro.

It's as boilerplate as you can get, and despite Tan being a capable actor and fighter, he's given less than nothing to work with here. Writer Greg Russo even decides that Cole's superpower should be "armour", seeing him store up energy from absorbing hits like Black Panther, but only returning the blow once.

He also gets some weird wicker basket-style tonfas as extensions to his arms, that barely get used again after this fight.

Also, speaking of Goro, the former champion of various Mortal Kombat tournaments gets reduced to a "heavy" goon for the hero to dispatch. Which he does... in a few minutes.