Mortal Kombat hit theaters on Apr. 23 and was met with an unenthusiastic response among fans and myself as the movie was underwhelming and overrated.

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The movie is a reboot of the original Mortal Kombat movies that were released in 1995 and 1997. The movie is also based off of the infamous arcade and video game that was released in 1992 by Midway Games, which became widely popular and inspired sequels to the game, action figures and merchandise lines.

The movie is rated R and is about a fighter, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), who gains superpowers at Lord Raiden’s temple and has to train with experienced fighters Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kung Lao (Max Huang) and Kano (Josh Lawson) to try to save the world. Young fights against his enemies from Outworld and millions of lives hang in the balance.

The plot is good, but there are a lot of elements of the movie that could use work including the fighting scenes, the main character Cole Young and some overall confusion.

To start, the fighting scenes are not well choreographed and executed. This movie focuses and revolves around fighting, and for it to look a bit cheesy and poorly performed leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

Next, the movie contains a lot of plot holes and confusion. “To me I wasn’t the biggest fan of this movie and I would give it two stars out of five. The fighting was extremely bad, there were lots of gaps that needed to be filled and it just didn’t feel like the Mortal Kombat from the video games. I also think that the sets were very subpar and didn’t showcase the settings from the games,” sophomore Evan Lewis said. 

The biggest issue is with Cole Young. In the video games and past movies, Young is shown to specialize in MMA and the fights are supposed to be Kung Fu and MMA specialized, but the fights are just generic Hollywood fight scenes. This is strange because Tan has the ability to fight in MMA and Kung Fu. In addition, Young doesn’t have much of a purpose and doesn’t do much until he gains his superpowers. This proves that almost anyone could gain the powers and be the lead protagonist, which isn’t a special selling point because that is not how it was marketed.

Overall, I would give the movie a 3.5 out of 10 because it has a lot of flaws with the plot, characters and fighting.Though it still had good character development for most characters and had some good actors and actresses in the cast.