Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

with Robin Shou, Talisa Soto, James Remar
Directed by John R. Leonetti
Written by Lawrence Kasanoff
by Scott Hefflon

The portal between worlds has opened again because that which can be closed can also be opened again. Before you can groan, butts start to get kicked. And throbbing music plays loud and steady. And most of the bad, um, things have extra arms, heads, legs, or stuff that makes things freeze, blow up, and other cool shit. Luckily, the sunglasses-wearing pansy who saved the day yesterday dies. That was quick. Unfortunately, some new chick who’s supposed to be the old chick but isn’t nearly as bad-ass as the old chick, doesn’t die. But she rolls around in the mud later in the movie. And somewhere in there, you’re really disappointed that Christopher Lambert isn’t the ambiguous white-haired guy who can shoot fire from his fingertips and have his eyes sparkle dangerously as he says something really tough. No, we’re left with, like, some earnest narrator named Ramen or something, and he really ain’t much of a god.

But still, it doesn’t matter as scenery morphs before your eyes, caverns and mountains and destroyed laboratories and whole worlds (and the blending of worlds) is the setting for this epic battle between good (yet not very convincingly good) and evil (yet not very interestingly evil). But at least the dark-skinned beauty from the last movie returns (though she does spend most of it in a cage), and her supposedly-dead mother looks an awful lot like Elvira.