Review: 'Mortal Kombat II' is a bloody, awful movie that only the franchise's most devoted fans might enjoy

Many of the same people who made the 2021 reboot of “Mortal Kombat” — based on the ‘90s video game — are back for “Mortal Kombat II,” including director Simon McQuoid and 10 cast members.

So what’s new in this sequel? Well, there’s Karl Urban — whose franchise credits include “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movies — hamming it up as Johnny Cage, a fading action star who gets a chance to uncover the warrior behind the Ray-Bans and 5 o’clock shadow. Besides him, it’s more of the same nonsensical and hyper-violent fighting.

In what passes for a plot in Jeremy Slater’s script, we’re told that Earth — sorry, Earthrealm, in the game’s parlance — is 0-for-9 in a combat tournament against the dark forces of the Outworld, and one more loss means the Outworld’s brutal emperor, the skull-masked Shao Kahn (played by the beefy Martyn Ford), will take over Earth forever. 

In the prologue, we see Shao Kahn conquer another world by killing its king and taking the queen, Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), and the princess, Kitana. As an adult, Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), is outwardly loyal to Shao Kahn, her stepdad, but secretly trains to one day fight him. 

In Earthrealm, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) gathers the available fighters for the next tournament, including returning characters: The energy-shooting Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), robot-armed Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), fire-wielding Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), power-absorbing Cole Young (Lewis Tan) and, eventually, the laser-eyed Scottish smart-mouth Kano (Josh Lawson). 

Kano’s presence, as well as that of enemy fighters Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), are proof that dying in the first movie wasn’t going to keep someone out of this one. And as Asano and his “Shogun” castmate Hiroyuki Sanada learned, winning Emmys wasn’t enough to break a contract to appear in the sequels.

If you’re expecting some clever screenwriting tricks to explain all of this, forget it. McQuoid and Slater are only interested in getting these characters on the set together so the fighting can start. And, as in the game, there’s a lot of blood-splattering carnage in front of green screens in the places where satisfying action sequences should go. Not even the game’s idiotic taglines — like “finish him!” and “get over here!” — can make “Mortal Kombat II” feel like more than watching someone else play a video game.

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‘Mortal Kombat II’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, and language. Running time: 116 minutes.