Mortal Kombat

Recently, a friend asked whether all films I like make me suspend belief. I responded that I hesitate to say that all films I like do one thing or another, but that yes, that’s generally the case.

MORTAL KOMBAT is among the reasons why I hesitated. This film is so poorly acted, so lazily choreographed and shot, so lame in so many ways that it requires an act of conscious will to suspend one’s disbelief for its running time. I love it anyway.

Here’s why: there’s a bit during which Johnny Cage, who is essentially Jean Claude Van Damme, is fighting a villain who can make lizard heads on chains fly from his palms. The fight begins in a beautiful grove, then magically transports to a kickass set that appears to be made of old sailing ship parts, plaster skeletons, cobwebs, and red gel lights. Cage lays down the fu just fine, but then he finds a pullup bar conveniently placed near a platform. He goes on to do a full Tribute to Gymkata, flips onto a platform, then does a nifty jumpkick to the villain’s head. That’s just awesome. Later in the fight, the villain turns into a flaming skeleton, a la GHOST RIDER, which is also awesome. Then Cage finds a way to blow up the flaming skeleton and does a classic “leap away from the rear projection fireball.” Among the debris that comes fluttering down is, you guessed it, an autographed photo of Johnny Cage, inscribed to his “Biggest Fan.” I say that if your biggest fan is a recently exploded flaming skeleton, then your career is going GREAT!

So yeah, it’s lame. Christopher Lambert is a lousy Basil Exposition. Robin Shou spends too much time on his hair. Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Soto, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are terrible actors. The fu isn’t good enough to merit long takes. But Linden Ashby (as Cage) acquits himself well; the creature design, particularly for the multiarmed warrior Goro, is quite good; the sets and locations are fantastic and beautiful; and the soundtrack is thumpin’.

All things considered, MORTAL KOMBAT is way more fun than it has any right to be.

Death Race

There are some actors out there who are in it for the paycheck. There are some who are in it solely to explore their art. There are some who explore their art when they can and take the paycheck when they must.

I guess Joan Allen had bills to pay.

I'm tempted to write that DEATH RACE is a bad, bad movie. Its races are incomprehensible agglomerations of gunfire, explosions, and quick-cuts that left me utterly mystified. When a movie's ostensibly about racing, even death racing, shouldn't one be able to tell who's in the lead, or even what's going on, without a ranking board popping up every now and then? Ms. Allen has a climactic outburst of villainy that was so ridiculous I nearly laughed. And don't get me started on the crime to Robin Shou's hair that this film represents.

But 40-year-olds with colds who can't muster the energy to do more than see a bad movie are not the target demographic of this particular film. The target demographic of this particular film is males aged 15-25. I saw this movie at an on-base movie theater at a naval airfield in Japan. The crowd was 100% male, and I'm pretty sure I was twice the age of the next-oldest guy there.

They loved it.

They cheered the explosions. They laughed at the comical kills. They howled at the pretty women. They hooted at the dialogue. Man, they ate DEATH RACE up. It was like their favorite video game come to life. On the way out, they chatted and laughed and high-fived and generally went home happy.

So, hey, if you're a 15-25 year old guy, you'll probably love DEATH RACE. If not, well, you'd better have one hell of a cold.

Red Trousers

You may remember Robin Shou from MORTAL KOMBAT, a fun-filled cheesefest from the mid-'90s. He played Liu Kang, the hero, and his skill at stuntwork was eclipsed only by his consistently great hair.

Well, Shou still has great hair, and he's still deeply involved in the stuntman's craft. With RED TROUSERS, he has directed a documentary about the lives of Hong Kong stuntmen, their roots in Chinese Opera, and the challenges they face as they ply their craft. It's an interesting film with the requisite number of talking heads and archival clips, but what makes it really fun is its use of a terrible movie-within-the-movie to illustrate how the sweat and pain of stuntwork delivers delivers those sequences that make the audience go, "Ooof! That's gotta hurt!" Will the general viewer find RED TROUSERS particularly engaging? Probably not, but fans of Hong Kong action pictures might want to give it a spin.