Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

1997

Directed by John R. Leonetti

Welcome back to Movie Monday, where we’re continuing our relentless march through my personal list of the 100 worst movies I’ve ever endured. This week we’re entering the arena for number 45: Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, the 1997 martial arts fantasy sequel that took everything moderately entertaining about the original Mortal Kombat and performed a fatality on it so brutal that even Sub-Zero would have winced. And yes, before we dive into this digital wasteland – this represents my personal opinion. If you somehow found joy in watching this collection of unfinished special effects masquerading as a movie, more power to you. We can still discuss the finer points of video game adaptations over coffee.

I’ll be honest – I went into Annihilation with appropriately lowered expectations. The original Mortal Kombat from 1995 was far from perfect, but it had managed something genuinely impressive: it was a video game adaptation that didn’t completely embarrass itself. Director Paul W.S. Anderson understood that the key to adapting Mortal Kombat wasn’t in slavishly recreating every gameplay mechanic, but in capturing the spirit of the source material while crafting something that worked as actual cinema. When the sequel was announced with most of the original cast replaced and a first-time director taking the helm, I suspected we were in for a rougher ride. What I didn’t anticipate was a movie so fundamentally broken that it makes you question whether anyone involved had ever seen the first film, let alone understood what made it work.

From Flawed Fun to Complete Catastrophe

To understand how spectacularly Annihilation fails, you need to appreciate what the original Mortal Kombat got right. That film wasn’t a masterpiece by any stretch – it had cheesy dialogue, variable acting, and special effects that were already showing their age by 1995. But it understood something crucial about video game adaptations: the audience isn’t necessarily looking for Citizen Kane. They want to see their favorite characters brought to life with enough style and energy to justify the transition from pixels to celluloid.

The 1995 film succeeded because it embraced its B-movie roots while still taking the material seriously enough to create genuine investment in the characters and story. Christopher Lambert’s Raiden was wonderfully eccentric without being cartoonish. Robin Shou’s Liu Kang felt like a real person who happened to be really good at martial arts. Even the more outlandish elements – like Goro, the four-armed Shokan prince – were presented with enough conviction that you could suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

Most importantly, the original film understood that Mortal Kombat was fundamentally about the tournament itself – a structured, rule-bound competition that gave every fight sequence meaning and stakes. The heroes weren’t just fighting random enemies; they were working their way through a bracket toward an ultimate confrontation that would determine the fate of Earth. It was simple, it was clear, and it worked.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation took one look at this formula and apparently decided what it really needed was incomprehensible plotting, wooden dialogue, and special effects that looked unfinished even by 1997 standards. It’s like watching someone take a decent cheeseburger and somehow transform it into a pile of unidentifiable mush that vaguely resembles food if you squint really hard.

The Great Recasting Disaster

Before we even get to the film’s numerous other problems, we need to discuss the wholesale replacement of the original cast. When I heard that Bridgette Wilson (Sonya Blade), Linden Ashby (Johnny Cage), and Christopher Lambert (Raiden) wouldn’t be returning for the sequel, I knew we were in trouble. These weren’t Oscar-caliber performances, but they had established a chemistry and energy that made the first film work despite its flaws.

The decision to kill off Johnny Cage in the opening sequence – essentially writing Linden Ashby out of the franchise in the most dismissive way possible – signals immediately that this film has no respect for what came before. Chris Conrad’s brief appearance as Cage feels perfunctory, like the filmmakers were checking a box before moving on to more important matters. It’s the cinematic equivalent of showing up to a party just long enough to announce you’re leaving.

James Remar steps into Christopher Lambert’s role as Raiden, and while Remar is generally a capable actor, he’s playing an entirely different character who happens to share the same name. Lambert’s Raiden was mysteriously playful, delivering cryptic wisdom with a knowing smile that suggested he was enjoying some cosmic joke the rest of us weren’t in on. Remar’s Raiden is dour and serious, lacking any of the charm that made the thunder god memorable in the first place.

Sandra Hess replaces Bridgette Wilson as Sonya Blade, and the performance difference is immediately apparent. Wilson brought a believable military toughness to the role, making Sonya feel like someone who had earned her place among elite fighters through skill and determination. Hess seems to be playing dress-up, delivering dialogue with all the conviction of someone reading cue cards for the first time.

Only Robin Shou and Talisa Soto return as Liu Kang and Kitana, respectively, and while their presence provides some continuity, they’re adrift in a sea of new faces and changed dynamics. It’s like trying to perform a symphony when most of the orchestra has been replaced with enthusiastic amateurs who learned their parts that morning.

A Plot That Defies Basic Storytelling Logic

The story, such as it is, abandons the clear tournament structure that gave the original film its narrative backbone. Instead, we get something about Shao Kahn opening portals between dimensions and the heroes racing around various locations to… well, it’s honestly not entirely clear what they’re trying to accomplish at any given moment.

The film opens with Shao Kahn’s invasion of Earth already underway, which immediately removes the anticipation and build-up that made the first film’s climax satisfying. We’re thrown into the middle of a conflict we don’t understand, with stakes that are never clearly defined, pursuing goals that seem to change every fifteen minutes. It’s like starting a novel on chapter seven and hoping you can figure out what’s happening through context clues.

The movie attempts to incorporate elements from Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, the fighting games that served as its primary source material. But instead of adapting these elements thoughtfully, the script seems to have been written by someone who glanced at a strategy guide and decided that cramming in as many characters and locations as possible would somehow equal entertainment. The result is a narrative that feels less like a story and more like a series of loosely connected fight scenes punctuated by exposition that raises more questions than it answers.

Even the film’s central quest – reuniting Kitana with her mother Sindel to break Shao Kahn’s hold on Earth – is poorly explained and even more poorly executed. The heroes pursue this goal with dedication that seems inversely proportional to how little sense it makes, creating a viewing experience that constantly has you wondering if you missed some crucial piece of information that would make everything click into place.

Animalities, Brutalities, and Other Indignities

One of the film’s most bizarre decisions is its focus on “Animalities” – a gameplay mechanic from the video games where fighters could transform into animals to finish off their opponents. In the context of a fighting game, this was a fun, over-the-top finishing move that players could unlock as a reward for mastering the mechanics. In the context of a movie, it becomes an excuse for some of the most ridiculous sequences ever committed to film.

Liu Kang’s transformation into a dragon during the climactic battle is the kind of moment that could work with proper build-up and execution. Instead, it feels like the filmmakers suddenly remembered they needed to include this element and threw it in without considering how it would affect the tone or pacing of the scene. The special effects used to accomplish this transformation look unfinished, creating a moment that’s supposed to be triumphant but instead feels embarrassing for everyone involved.

The film’s treatment of other game elements is equally tone-deaf. Characters appear and disappear without explanation, presumably because they were popular in the games but serve no narrative function in the movie. Motaro, the centaur warrior, shows up for what amounts to an extended cameo that exists solely to check another character off the fan service list. It’s the kind of approach that suggests the filmmakers were more interested in creating a greatest hits compilation than an actual story.

Even the fatalities – the signature finishing moves that made Mortal Kombat famous (and infamous) – are handled with a strange lack of creativity or impact. The original film managed to include nods to these brutal finishing moves while maintaining its PG-13 rating through clever editing and implied violence. Annihilation seems afraid of its own source material, delivering action sequences that feel sanitized and weightless.

Technical Disasters and Unfinished Business

Perhaps the most damning thing about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is how obviously unfinished it feels. Producer Lawrence Kasanoff later revealed that the film was released with incomplete special effects, admitting that “the effects in that movie are not the final effects.” This explains why so many sequences feel like rough drafts – because they literally were.

The CGI characters, particularly the various monsters and creatures that populate Outworld, look like early test renders that were never properly refined. Movements are jerky and unconvincing, textures look flat and artificial, and the integration between practical and digital elements is so poor that characters seem to exist in completely different universes even when they’re sharing the same frame.

The fight choreography, which should be the film’s strongest element, suffers from poor editing and staging that makes it difficult to follow the action or appreciate the skill of the performers. Where the original film used dynamic camera work and clear spatial relationships to make every punch and kick feel impactful, Annihilation relies on rapid-fire editing that creates confusion rather than excitement.

Even the film’s production design feels rushed and cheap. The various realms that the characters visit look like abandoned theme park attractions rather than the mystical dimensions they’re supposed to represent. Costumes that should feel otherworldly instead look like they were assembled from whatever was available in the studio’s wardrobe department.

The Video Game Adaptation Curse

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation represents everything wrong with video game adaptations at their worst. The film seems to have been made by people who understood that the games were popular but had no grasp of why they resonated with audiences. The Mortal Kombat franchise succeeded as a game series because it combined precise, skill-based combat with a mythology that was both epic and just silly enough to be entertaining.

The games told their story through brief cutscenes and character endings, leaving players to fill in the gaps with their imagination. This actually worked in the medium’s favor – the sparse storytelling allowed players to project their own interpretations onto the characters and conflicts. A successful film adaptation would need to expand on this foundation thoughtfully, creating fuller characterizations and more detailed world-building while preserving the essential spirit of the source material.

Instead, Annihilation seems to have approached the adaptation process by making a list of popular characters and locations from the games and then trying to cram them all into a single film without considering whether they served any narrative purpose. It’s like trying to adapt a greatest hits album into a coherent story – you end up with all the recognizable elements but none of the structure that would make them meaningful.

The film also suffers from the common video game adaptation problem of treating the source material as inherently juvenile. While the Mortal Kombat games certainly weren’t high art, they took their own mythology seriously enough to create investment in the characters and conflicts. Annihilation approaches the material with a kind of embarrassed irony that suggests the filmmakers were ashamed of their source material rather than inspired by it.

Box Office Mortal Kombat: A Pyrrhic Victory

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation opened at number one at the box office with a $16 million weekend, which initially seemed to suggest that audiences were hungry for more Mortal Kombat action. However, the film’s total domestic gross of $35 million against a $30 million budget told a different story – word of mouth was so toxic that repeat viewings and sustained interest simply didn’t materialize.

For context, the original Mortal Kombat had grossed $70 million domestically on an $18 million budget, proving that there was genuine audience appetite for this kind of entertainment when executed competently. Annihilation‘s inability to match even half of its predecessor’s performance, despite opening in more theaters and benefiting from improved brand recognition, demonstrates just how thoroughly it failed to deliver what audiences wanted.

The international box office helped push the film’s worldwide total to $51.3 million, but this was still a disappointment that effectively killed the franchise for nearly two decades. When your sequel performs so poorly that it prevents any future sequels from being made, you’ve achieved a special kind of commercial failure that goes beyond mere financial disappointment into active brand destruction.

Critical Kombat: When Even Low Expectations Aren’t Low Enough

The critical reception was about as brutal as you’d expect for a film this fundamentally broken. Annihilation currently holds a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes – a score so low that it actually becomes impressive in its own way. To achieve that level of critical consensus requires a special kind of incompetence that transcends normal filmmaking failures.

Critics noted that the film made its predecessor look like a masterpiece by comparison, which is particularly damning given that the original wasn’t exactly Seven Samurai. When your movie makes people nostalgic for a film that was already considered a guilty pleasure, you’ve accomplished something truly special in the realm of disappointment.

Even more telling were the comments from Mortal Kombat co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias, who both selected Annihilation as their personal worst moments in the history of the franchise they created. When the people who invented the source material want to disown your adaptation, you’ve failed in ways that go beyond normal creative differences into active betrayal of artistic vision.

Why Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Earns Its Place at Number 45

So why does Mortal Kombat: Annihilation land at number 45 on my personal worst movies list? It’s because the film represents a perfect storm of wasted potential, creative laziness, and fundamental misunderstanding of what made its source material appealing in the first place.

The original Mortal Kombat proved that video game adaptations could work when approached with respect for the source material and basic competence in storytelling. Annihilation took that foundation and somehow managed to create something worse than if they had never made the first film at all. It’s the kind of sequel that actively diminishes your appreciation for what came before.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that all the elements for success were available. The Mortal Kombat franchise provided a rich mythology with distinctive characters and clear conflicts. The first film had established a template that worked. The budget was sufficient to create impressive action sequences and special effects. Instead, we got a movie that feels like it was assembled by a committee that had never met and was working from different scripts.

The film also represents everything wrong with sequel-making at its most cynical. Rather than building on the strengths of the original, Annihilation seems designed to capitalize on brand recognition while spending as little effort as possible on actual storytelling. It’s the kind of cash-grab follow-up that gives sequels a bad name and makes audiences suspicious of any continuation of properties they enjoyed.

Most damningly, Annihilation fails as both a sequel and as a standalone film. Fans of the original are disappointed by the abandonment of everything that worked, while newcomers are confused by the assumption of familiarity with characters and concepts that are never properly explained. It’s a movie that manages to alienate everyone who might conceivably want to watch it.

The Long-Term Damage: Franchise Fatality

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is how thoroughly it damaged the Mortal Kombat brand in Hollywood. The original film had opened doors for video game adaptations and proven that these properties could be commercially successful when handled with care. Annihilation slammed those doors shut and convinced studios that video game movies were inherently doomed to failure.

It took nearly 25 years for Hollywood to take another serious shot at adapting Mortal Kombat, and when they finally did in 2021, part of the marketing campaign seemed designed to reassure audiences that this version would bear no resemblance to Annihilation. That’s how thoroughly this film failed – even decades later, new adaptations had to explicitly distance themselves from its legacy.

The film’s failure also contributed to a broader perception that sequels to video game movies were particularly risky propositions. This wasn’t entirely unfair – Annihilation proved that success with a video game adaptation didn’t guarantee understanding of what made that success possible – but it did limit opportunities for franchises that might have benefited from continuation under better creative guidance.

The Silver Lining: Lessons in How Not to Make a Sequel

If there’s one positive thing to say about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, it’s that it serves as a perfect case study in sequel-making mistakes. The film’s failures helped establish some basic principles for continuing successful franchises: understand what made the original work, respect the cast and characters that audiences connected with, and don’t assume that brand recognition alone will carry a movie to success.

The movie also provided valuable lessons for video game adaptations. The contrast between the original Mortal Kombat and Annihilation clearly demonstrated that the key to successful adaptation isn’t in slavishly recreating every element from the source material, but in understanding the spirit and appeal of what you’re adapting and translating that effectively to a new medium.

For action movie fans, Annihilation serves as a reminder of how crucial proper planning and execution are to creating entertaining spectacle. The film had access to impressive stunt performers and choreographers, but poor direction and editing turned potentially exciting fight sequences into confusing messes that highlight the importance of competent filmmaking in every aspect of production.

The Bottom Line

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation stands as a monument to the dangers of treating successful franchises as automatic money-makers rather than creative properties that require care and understanding. It’s a film that had every advantage – a proven concept, recognizable characters, and sufficient resources – and still managed to create something actively boring and confusing.

The movie fails because it confuses familiarity with entertainment, character recognition with character development, and spectacle with substance. It’s a film that seems to have been made by people who thought that simply including elements from the source material would automatically result in audience satisfaction, without considering whether those elements served any narrative purpose or contributed to a coherent viewing experience.

In the end, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is like a greatest hits compilation performed by a cover band that learned the songs by reading sheet music but never heard the original recordings. All the recognizable elements are technically present, but the spirit and energy that made them worth experiencing in the first place has been completely lost in translation. It’s a movie that makes you appreciate how difficult it is to create effective entertainment and how easy it is to destroy something good through carelessness and lack of inspiration.

Next week on Movie Monday, we’ll continue our journey through cinematic disappointment with number 44: Cats and Dogs, a film that took the simple concept of pets having a secret war and somehow managed to create something that will make you question humanity’s relationship with both animals and entertainment. Until then, remember: just because you can make a sequel doesn’t mean you should, and sometimes the most disappointing movies are the ones that had every reason to succeed.

What are your thoughts on Mortal Kombat: Annihilation? Did you manage to find any entertainment value in this digital disaster, or do you think it deserves its place among the worst sequels ever made? Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear if anyone out there has a defense for this fatality-inducing franchise killer.