It has been just over twenty-three years since the last Mortal Kombat movie came out in 1997, Annihilation, and over twenty-five since the first Mortal Kombat movie in 1995. While animated films, a television show, and of course the video games have kept the series going, next year we will return to Mortal Kombat as a live-action film, with director Simon McQuoid bringing us blood and, naturally, fatalities.
McQuoid and the cast of the film spoke to Entertainment Weekly (and shared images you can see on the site), and what I find compelling is that he sees the importance of telling a compelling narrative and, also, embracing the gore the series is known for. Although, he does promise fatalities.
“There are some crazy fatalities,” said Lewis Tan, who is playing Cole Young, a new character created for the film. “We’ve picked a couple of iconic ones. There’s a lot of really cool signature moves that you’ll see, a lot of Easter eggs that we snuck into the film, but there are some really badass fatalities that I can’t wait to see on the big screen. They’re brutal, man. They, they don’t hold back.”
McQuoid notes that they “didn’t want to get into NC-17 territory. It’s amazing how quickly you can get there. It doesn’t take much.”
I would say most, if not all of the Mortal Kombat fatalities take it to that place, so I’m interested in seeing how far they push that R rating.
The beginning of the movie focuses on the blood feud between Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Bi-Han/Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim). “[Hanzo’s] the leader of a ninja clan and he’s strong, but also… at the beginning, he’s a peaceful family man,” Sanada says. “It is like a family drama with excitingly brutal fighting. That’s the image of this movie for me,” he adds.
Because both actors have experience in martial arts, it will be a hand-to-hand fight that, I’m sure, will set the tone for the kind of the brutality the film wants to establish. Entertainment Weekly reports,
“Out of context this quote might seem incendiary, it’s not: The rules around ratings aren’t what a lot of people think they are,” McQuoid says. “It’s amount of blood, it’s amount of red, it’s interpretation of how you go about it. We had a lot of discussions about getting the balance right so there was gore and there was blood and there were fatalities.” He pauses to repeat what he just said. “And there is gore, blood, and fatalities.”
In addition to the cast members mentioned here, we have Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Mehcad Brooks as Jackson “Jax” Briggs, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, and Sisi Stringer as Mileena. Mortal Kombat is scheduled for a simultaneous release in theaters and on HBO Max on April 16.
(via Entertainment Weekly, image: Warner Bros.)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
