Film Review - Mortal Kombat II (2026)

Mortal Kombat II is the follow up to 2021’s Mortal Kombat film and Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) seeks to rule the Earthrealm through the Mortal Kombat tournament and now Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) must rally his fighters to save Earthrealm from Shao Kahn’s tyranny.

Mortal Kombat II was easily one of my most anticipated films of the year (only the Odyssey, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping and Dune Part Three I anticipated as much) even though I was fairly disappointed in the 2021 MK film which was only watchable when Josh Lawson’s Kano (a great Australian) was on screen but MKII the game was a big step up from the first game so could the movie do the same.

HELL YES!! I had a great time with this movie and in almost every way this movie is an improvement and first off you actually have lead characters you give a shit about, Cole Young from the first film felt like a relic of an older time in terms of being the “mainstream outsider” lead and wisely his screen time is much reduced and this time Adeline Rudolph’s Kitana and Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage are the co-leads with Ludi Lim’s Liu Kang and Jessica McNamee’s Sonya getting larger roles and it makes a huge difference as those characters work much better in bringing you into that world and Urban is terrific fun as Cage bringing a smug smartassery with the fighting skills to back it up to the role and working well and one joke he has made me laugh out loud in the cinema.

As for Rudolph as Kitana she is a great find handling both the emotional moments and the battle scenes very well and I hope I see more of her in the future also Ford is a memorable Shao Kahn who was always a pain in the ass to beat in Mortal Kombat II and 3 and thankfully he is a formidable foe here.

Next up the fight scenes and arena locations are so much better than the empty lifeless arena the first film had and many iconic locations from the games are nicely recreated especially the acid pit from Game 2 and the Portal Bridge from MK3 and also the fight scenes are really good here especially when Shao Kahn fights plus Baraka (a very cool practical effect) vs Johnny Cage and Liu Kang vs Kung Lao not to mention the climax of the film in the Netherworld which makes great use of the ensemble cast.

And lastly the storytelling here is much cleaner and it reminded me a lot of the recent Mortal Kombat games where you would have the brief cutscenes before getting to the fights and the story scenes in this movie reminded a lot of those and while it doesn’t always work I didn’t hate it all that much.

And so that was Mortal Kombat II and this is a sequel that knows what it wants to be and does it very very well, this 90s kid is a very happy man, 4 out of 5.