… But then, Shao Kahn gets better. And he immediately flips a stunned Cole on his back so he can smash his face in with the nightmarish Wrath Hammer. The geyser of red stuff that erupts makes it look like Gallagher Night at the Comedy Cellar circa 1989. Furthermore, even in a franchise where death is negotiable—we saw five full or quasi-resurrections in this movie alone!—it seems pretty final here. After all, this sequence takes place in the Dead Pool arena where an alluring pit of glowy green acid rests just off-platform, and Shao Kahn makes sure to knock Cole’s body deep into the bone-melting dip.
It’s a brutal end to a character who was once thought to be an audience surrogate and instead ended up the butt of a fairly mean-spirited joke. On one hand, it’s hard not to laugh along as it’s delivered in Simon McQuoid’s movie with the kind of cheeky, lizard-brain barbarism that made the Mortal Kombat franchise so popular in the first place. On the other, you suspect this was a rather overt attempt at a course correction, intended to please the most vocal online fans who were eager to turn Tan’s work in the first film into a gooey punch (or hammer?) line.
While no reason has officially been given (yet) for Cole’s coup de grâce beyond general flowers for anyone who is killed off in Mortal Kombat II—MK co-creator Ed Boon previously told us he thought, “Oh, I don’t want to see this person die!’” when reading the script—we cannot help but suspect it has something to do with an online narrative among fans. And it’s not a friendly narrative to Cole or Tan either. A cursory glance of social platforms like X or Reddit finds comments like, “He’s boring protag that’s shoved down our throats and is nothing more than someone who listens to exposition who through the power of his lazy arcana called plot armor beat one of FG’s most iconic boss.”
Some criticism may be aimed at Tan’s performance but more seems dedicated to the fact that in a franchise famous for having dozens of playable characters, Warner Bros. inexplicably elected to create an original audience surrogate for the 2021 film. And fans did not like seeing this guy win fights against familiar video game characters.
One has to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Tan, who was quite solid in Into the Badlands but was set up here to fail by playing a character diehard fans would reject. Granted, his backstory as a reluctant fighter and self-doubting father in 2021’s Mortal Kombat left something to be desired, especially opposite the flashiness of Josh Lawson’s scenery-chewing as Kano or the sheer gravitas and grace Hiroyuki Sanada brings to any role, even that of a guy who fires harpoons from his hands. Nonetheless, Tan might have had better luck (or a reception) with a character fans recognized.
Instead the fact he was an original character made some instantly resistant. And in an age where social media discourse shapes marketing decisions, the choice became not only about introducing a new lead like Johnny Cage, but removing the effrontery of Cole Young altogether. Violently too.
