It’s been a long time coming. The last time an adaptation of the hugely popular video game franchise, Mortal Kombat, graced our screens was back in 1997, when Mortal Kombat: Annihilation received a critical and commercial drubbing comparable to the franchise’s bloodiest fatalities. In the two-plus decades since, a reboot has been mooted a number of times, with director Kevin Tancharoen receiving the green light off the back of his Mortal Kombat: Rebirth fan film.
Now, at long last, the tournament is on again, thanks to producer James Wan (Saw, Aquaman) and debuting director Simon McQuoid. Set for release in Australia on April 22, Mortal Kombat sees Lewis Tan as Cole Young, an MMA fighter who finds himself targeted by the mystical assassin Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim of The Raid and The Night Comes for Us) on the orders of Outworld Emperor Shang Tsung (Chin Han). Trying to uncover the motive behind the attack, Young is quickly embroiled in an inter-dimensional battle for the very survival of the Earth, teaming up with martial artist Sonya Blade (Home and Away’s Jessica McNamee), ex-special forces soldier Jax (Mehcad Brooks of Supergirl), and maverick mercenary Kano (Josh Lawson, recently seen as Paul Hogan in Hoges) under the tutelage of thunder god Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano of Thor and Midway).
Tadanobu Asano as Lord Raiden in ‘Mortal Kombat’
All that will sound very familiar to fans of the games and prior films, but it’s the way you rip the spine out of a defeated enemy, not just the act of ripping itself. Working from a script by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham, McQuoid, Wan and fellow producer Todd Garner have pulled out all the stops. They’ve assembled a world class team of martial artists and stunt performers, plus literally thousands of litres of fake blood and acres of prosthetic torn flesh, and decamping to South Australia, where Adelaide Studios and various locations around the state stood in for the film’s far-flung battlefields. And so that’s where I found myself at the tail end of 2019, being led through a recreation of Raiden’s Temple, a crystal-festooned, red earth cave, to pick the brains of various cast and crew members.
Although he’s a veteran — not to mention award-winning — commercial director, McQuoid was relatively new to the world of Mortal Kombat when he came on board the project. He’s taken his homework very seriously. “I’ve tried to go to Mortal Kombat university in preparation for this,” he tells us. “I’ve done the best I can over the last three and a half years of development.” That involved not only grappling with the franchise’s intricate lore but getting a handle on its vast and diverse cast of characters, which McQuoid says are key to the series’ long-lasting appeal.
“Ultimately, Mortal Kombat is popular because of its characters. There’s been plenty of fighting games that are similar, but I think the reason it’s stood the test of time is the timelessness of those really interesting characters. So, bringing a genuine human connective quality to the characters for the audience is really what’s driving us across the board. It informs costume, it informs who we cast, it informs how we block scenes or manage [the] purpose of each scene. It’s all driven by just trying to make the characters feel really genuine.”
Josh Lawson as Kano in ‘Mortal Kombat’
Of course, while flesh and blood characters are key, so is actual — or at least movie-real — flesh and blood. Producer Todd Garner pulls no punches when he explains what he wants from the film: spectacular martial arts action. Citing the recent upswing in Asian action cinema from filmmakers like Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans, he promises we’re going to see fight sequences that’ll raise the bar for on-screen martial arts.
“We weren’t going to lean on actors to try and be fighters, we cast people that are great at both and are known for both. And then Chan Griffin (Aquaman, Thor: Ragnarok) who is doing our fight choreography is arguably one of the best fight choreographers in the business. We also know that Marvel does just ridiculously insanely expensive wire work so we can’t compete on that level, so all we can do is have really great visceral fights with the real actors to do the fighting and we have accomplished that.”
“Really great visceral fights” demand really great visceral effects work, and Larry Van Duynhoven is one of the best in business, having worked on such gory cinematic delights as The Invisible Man, Hacksaw Ridge and the acclaimed but harrowing historical drama, The Nightingale. While he filled us in on the stupendous amounts of blood required for Mortal Kombat — “a couple of hundred litres a day” — I got an up close and personal demonstration of his craft as he fitted me with a gnarly facial wound.
Ludi Lin as Liu Kang and Max Huang as Kung Lao in ‘Mortal Kombat’
“Yesterday we got to explode a couple of heads,” he says casually. “That was pretty gruesome. And then last week we split someone in half. They’ve got their moments. It is what I do for a living, I’ve got to admit I’d like to have more, you know what I mean? There’s always room for more.”
While almost no tentpole film is bereft of computer-generated effects these days, Van Duynhoven stresses that Mortal Kombat is going to be heavy on the practical effects work. He’s been bounding around the state, fitting actors with make up prosthetics, wrangling extra — and severed — limbs and, of course, orchestrating all manner of gruesome deaths. But he doesn’t just want to gross us out — he wants to move us. “There’s something about CG that has no connection with our psyche. If you haven’t got connection then you’re lost, and I think with prosthetics you still got that connection, that’s still important and I think we still win over CGI.”
Of course, our main point of connection with Mortal Kombat is its cast, and specifically leading man Lewis Tan. The British actor is certainly no stranger to on-screen martial arts, having appeared in Into the Badlands, Wu Assassins, and Iron Fist. Here he’s playing a character new to the franchise, a human fighter who is our pathway into the mystic, martial world of Mortal Kombat.
Speaking about his character, Tan explains, “He starts off in the beginning of the film an MMA fighter, kind of down on his luck, and he has a young daughter who is obsessed with martial arts, he’s just at a loss he can’t catch a break. He used to be a champion and he just knows he’s there for something greater. I think a lot of people have felt that way before in their life, where they missed the destiny that they felt they were called to do. He goes on this wild journey and through that we see the scope of the Mortal Kombat world.”
Lewis Tan as Cole Young In ‘Mortal Kombat’
This being Mortal Kombat, that journey involves an awful lot of fighting. Coming from a stunt and martial arts background, Tan was determined that Cole’s emerging style reflect the character’s growth in the film. “Martial arts is expression. It’s the same thing as acting. It’s not really any different — it’s like dancing. Can you express emotion through movement? Yes. So, for me I don’t have to focus on training or worrying about my martial arts skills; I can just perform and it’s just another avenue to express myself.
“With Cole, I wanted the character’s style to develop as he was developing in the film, as his confidence was developing. So yeah, the movements are very interpretative to how he is feeling at the time. He’s the only character that doesn’t have that strong Mortal Kombat backstory. So for me, it’s something that’s exciting but it’s also super challenging and scary because there’s a lot of pressure to make sure that he can hold his own in this world of characters that are all really amazing and have a lot of rich history.”
Again and again, everyone involved talks about the importance of balancing character and spectacle, gore and story. “I think there’s room for both,” McQuoid muses. “I think as far as the gore and the blood level is concerned, that’s really about the tonality of how we show it. There’s scenes where there’s a s*** load of blood so we are not shying away from it, but I wanted it done in a way that feels respectful, because there’s a shocking way to do and then there’s a really elegant sort of elevated way of doing it.”
Elevated gore — that’s Mortal Kombat in a nutshell. We can’t wait.
Mortal Kombat is in cinemas Thursday, 22 April.
Josh Lawson as Kano and Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade in ‘Mortal Kombat’
LEAD IMAGE: Mehcad Brooks as Major Jackson “Jax” Briggs and Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero/Bi-Han in New Line Cinema’s action-adventure ‘Mortal Kombat’, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. All images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
