Stephen Thompson

Come on, Steven.

No.

Right, exactly.

And so I'm not necessarily coming into these films with the backstory already uploaded into my brain.

And so for me, was I lost?

No, I was not lost.

These films are fairly easy to follow in part because all that kind of portentous lore about different realms is being fed to me by Charlie Brown's teacher.

Not only am I not like processing it, I am not hearing it.

It is just want, want, want, want, want, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But then you get to these incredibly bloody battles, and there's literally a scoreboard in the sky that tells you how the movie is progressing.

All it really needed was an actual line with a score and the little health meter.

Sure.

And at the same time, I mean, we talked about this a little bit.

We kind of reconvened our fan service panel from Super Mario Galaxy for this conversation.

There is an element of this film that feels a little bit like a playthrough, you know, where it feels a little bit like you're watching a video game.

And if that is not necessarily your bag, but if it wasn't your bag, you're probably not going to see Mortal Kombat 2.

And so I did appreciate in this film kind of

as opposed to, I think, some of the other films in this series, not just the 2021 film, but the films from the 90s, there is this sense, I think, a little bit more of like, they're going for a certain amount of meta self-awareness here and kind of creating a little bit of a permission structure for some of the sillier and more portentous stuff, some of the

really, really clunky dialogue.

And one of the ways that they kind of get you to that point is with that Johnny Cage character, played by Carl Urban, who is very silly.