Mortal Kombat II

Remember the start of "Galaxy Quest" (1999) when a group of actors are drafted in to help rescue the universe from a nasty megalomaniac bent on intergalactic domination? Well, this time it's poor old "Johnny Cage" (Karl Urban) who's the past his sell-by-date Thespian reluctantly recruited by "Lord Raiden" (Tadanobu Asano) to help save the Earth realm from certain doom. He is to join four other som…

Unbearably, tooth-achingly bad. Now, you can only do so much with a plot of a computer game from the early 90s that has been filmed umpteen times already, but this is a new low. And a cleaned up, one-dimensional version of Butcher can't save it. Just no.…

On first watch of the trailer, I expected that Johnny Cage would be the centerpiece, capitalizing on Karl Urban's name. While the usual formulaic approach and a bit of convoluted and disjointed script, it did pay homage to the previous film (though not the video game). I did appreciate that they gave mostly equal balance to the different characters, though it lacked backstories to everyone but Cag…