How Mortal Kombat 2021 Gets EVERYTHING Wrong

3. The Closing 20 Minutes And Wasting The Pit Stage

Onto the mind-melting stuff, because what the hell is the closing 20 minutes of this movie??

We go into a strange place "in between realms" where Raiden explains that "no one can find us here". Besides meaning everything leading to that point could've been avoided and Kung Lao could've survived, Cole then gets his 2012 Avengers Captain America on, proceeding to tell the gang who to fight and how.

Russo has later said that the movie was conceptualised under the mandate of thinking like Marvel, and boy can you tell right here. Cole's character completely changes, his "revelatory" dialogue about how they "need to keep fighting" motivates the team, and it feels like Russo recreating the scene where Cap tells Thor he's "got the lightning", as Cole tells Sonya to watch out for Kano's eye laser.

During this "planning stage", we then start intercutting with fights that will happen in the future, but resolve them just seconds after, before Cole has even stopped explaining what the gang are ABOUT to do.

Worst of the lot is Jax going up Reiko - for a total of 40 seconds - but the duel taking place on Mortal Kombat's legendary "Pit" stage. It's lit the exact same way, the floor is filled with spikes - it's the perfect setup to send an opponent flying down onto them, like almost 30 years' worth of games have let us do.

Does that happen though? No. Jax claps his hands together and kills Reiko that way instead. It feels as though Reiko's body could have fallen onto the spikes afterwards, but the rushed nature of this entire closing chunk means we have to cut away.