Quote (izParagonzi @ May 19 2021 11:21pm)
Quite interesting reading the posts from jadeoshbogosh and Kayeto.
Now... Mortal Kombat 1 ... Game and their storyline started years beforehand.
And it was NOT just on Earth.
Now, the later games and movies fill in the gaps... yes, it is similar to Star Wars or Peter Jacksons Lord of the Rings, but, how does one direct backlog of history here to bring it up to date for Mortal Kombat 1, shit, this doesn't include any other sequels.
Basically, the so called B-grade acting in Mortal Kombat movies are based on the fact that the Director or whatever was focused on the ACTION, thus hiring actual martial artists with skill, but NOT acting skill.
I mean for fudge sake... Jason Stratos (hopefully correct) would have been a GREAT actor for Johnny Cage). Liu Kang... who would you like to act for him? Jet Li maybe? or maybe Tony Jaa? there are multitudes of actors and CGI can change their age.
Sorry, see a lot of b-gen MK movies with no substance to the actual storyline of the game, they only give a minimal amount of history... maybe that is the issue.
Neither of those guys are good actors lol. Don't get me wrong, I like them both and enjoy their movies, but they can't act for shit.
I personally like the idea of going away from Kang as the lead. If they had someone who wasn't utterly trash play Cole (could have picked thousands of competent actors), then the movie would have been more enjoyable overall. The biggest fuck-ups on casting were Cole, Sonja, and Raiden. Kano was the only one that was actually good, but Kang, Lao, and Jax I could at least stomach. They somehow made the original Raiden by Lambert, one of the most outlandishly bad performances in video game film history, the better Raiden of the two. As Raiden wasn't involved in combat at all, there's ZERO justification for allowing his performance to be that painfully bad.
All that being said, it's still a combination of things. They could have casted all A-Listers for this and if they don't rewrite that dumpster fire of a script, it's still going to be the same end result.
Until a studio is willing to actually spend the necessary cash to start with a decent script and build a competent cast around it, we're not going to see a good film in this genre. The continuing trend has been to go all-in on special effects, violence, choreography, etc... Resident Evil, Silent Hill, WoW, MK, Prince of Persia, Rampage, Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, it goes on and on and on. Even when they do put a TON of money into them for a cast + effects, they think we the viewers are stupid, so they massively change/dumb shit down, and put together a bland/boring script and try to make us ooh and awe with cool effects. It works with superhero films and your run-of-the-mill summer blockbusters, but that shit isn't going to fly with video game films. When you put together a shitty script and completely butcher the source material, you alienate fans of the franchise (who are the ones writing reviews online in the first place), and your casual viewers come away confused as fuck lol.
This is why I for one am so fucking ecstatic with the rise of premium streaming channels. We're in the golden age of television, where truly phenomenal shows, that cover every genre, are coming out multiple times a year. I think loads of comic/video-game/nerdy source material would be fucking PERFECT for this type of adaptation, but I've lost all hope in it ever happening on the big screen.