Get ready for blood, punches, and at least a few instances of getting over here…which usually leads to a bit more of the aforementioned blood and punching.
Just two months before the film is set to release, Warner Bros. has finally given us a good look at Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat video game adaptation, setting the stage for a mighty martial competition (Kompetition? You know how MK is) between the warriors of Outworld and Earthrealm.
Get over here! Watch the trailer for Mortal Kombat now — in theaters and streaming exclusively on HBO Max April 16. #MortalKombatMovie pic.twitter.com/eFhQhbdNUl
— Mortal Kombat Movie (@MKMovie) February 18, 2021
(You can also check out the full, gloriously gory red-band trailer over on Youtube!)
The trailer introduces us to a bunch of conflicts even before we get to the “actual martial arts tournament for the fate of two worlds” schtick, all framed around the mystery of Lewis Tan’s character, newly created for the film, Cole Young. We get plenty of glimpses in here of favourites like Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks), as well as the endless rivalry between Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), both as ninjas and as…well, superpowered fire-frost-hell-ninjas. And there’s also plenty of teases of other fighters from the series that will make appearances that we didn’t know about already, like Reptile — and other nods to the game like Liu Kang’s dragon move, and Scorpion’s infamous grapple quote.
Of course, it’s all quite got the potential to be a gore-laden punch-fest, which is kind of what you want out of a Mortal Kombat movie. Anything else is a cherry on top of the viscera cake, so to speak. We won’t have that much longer to wait to see if it can live up to the cheese-fest of MK’s past cinematic adaptations or provide something as interesting as latest entries in the game series have done from a storytelling perspective, though.
Mortal Kombat hits Australian theatres on April 15.