Despite the strict continuity in plot, the end of Mortal Kombat and the start of Annihilation look very different. Robin Shou and Talisa Soto still play Liu Kang and Kitana, but James Remar is Raiden instead of Christopher Lambert, Sandra Hess has replaced Bridget Wilson as Sonya, and Chris Conrad takes Linden Ashby’s place as Johnny Cage, at least for the five minutes he’s on screen, before Shao Khan snaps his neck. Later, Red Williams joins the cast as Sonya’s partner Jax, replacing Gregory Williams, who portrayed the character in a brief cameo in the first movie.
It’s not really the cast changes that mark a difference between the two films. The original has all of the features that people love/hate in Anderson’s later movies, manifested in a goofy performance by Lambert and some shoddy plotting. The second film has all those problems, only more so. Characters such as Sub-Zero and Scorpion pop in and then disappear from the story, Thompson, who has an otherworldly presence in The X-Files and Cobra, feels like a regular dude than a great conqueror, and a giant CGI-monster fight in the climax is both nonsensical and ugly. B-movie king Remar seems half-asleep while delivering his lines, and Williams is asked to do little more than shout slang as Jax.
Not Flawless, Still a Victory
Yet, the corniness of Annihilation matches the corniness that’s always been present in the games, even when it was freaking out parents and legislators in the mid-’90s. The spine-ripping always has more Looney Tunes to it than Faces of Death, and no series that includes babalities and “Toasty!” can have too many pretensions. Nor can a series that built half of its roster out of palette swaps complain about any filmmaker’s frugality.
If Annihilation treated those strange aspects to Mortal Kombat with derision, then it would deserve the fan’s ire. But instead, the movie seems to lean into the silly parts of the games. We see this with the introduction of new characters Nightwolf (Litefoot) and Baraka (Dennis Keiffer). Neither character arrives with the best effects, as Nightwolf transforms from a wolf to a person with all the prestige of an Animorphs cover and Baraka’s giant head and flailing arms make him look more like a confused high school magic than a blade demon. But look at how unabashedly Keiffer throws himself into playing Baraka, or how Litefoot delivers the clunker “Cool, huh? It’s my animality.” with conviction. These guys are clearly having fun.
One gets the same feeling watching the pay off of the animality plot, when Lui Kang becomes a dragon and Shao Kahn becomes a gorgon thing. It looks horrible, and the mechanics of the fight make no sense, especially when Lui Kang’s dragon—a famously flying creature with giant wings—gets scared about falling off a cliff. At the same time, you have to respect the filmmakers for trying to do a big kaiju battle at the climax of their movie, even if it looks janky.
In fact, all the clunky visuals now come off as charming instead of irritating. The shots of Jax punching toward the camera aren’t as cool as a middle-distance shot of him actual grappling with a monster, but they have their charm. The endless shots of ninjas twirling through the sky recall a ’90s screensaver, in a way that feels nostalgic now.
