During the later days of the video game arcade era, two wildly popular fighting games found themselves competing against each other for the quarters of players everywhere. Those games were “Street Fighter II” and the considerably more brutal “Mortal Kombat”. Both had legions of passionate fans who would gather around the cabinets and pump in coins for hours. Both ended up leaving a surprising footprint on pop culture, even getting their own mid-1990s movie adaptations.

While a “Street Fighter” reboot hits theaters later this year, “Mortal Kombat” got its own back in 2021. Unfortunately, with the exception of its terrific opening sequence, the movie was serviceable for fans but ultimately a letdown. Director Simon McQuoid went all-in for the R-rating, gifting fans of the video games with all the blood-drenched throwdowns and gory fatalities they could want. But the film didn’t tell a compelling story. Instead, it just expected you to know enough. And if you didn’t, too bad.

McQuoid returns to direct “Mortal Kombat II”, this time working with a different screenwriter, Jeremy Slater. Their film does a lot of the same things. For starters, they once again expect you to know the basics. But if you don’t, they throw in brief yet jarringly on-point exposition drops that only serve that one purpose. They surround these scenes with some incredibly silly and stilted dialogue that aren’t always meant to earn the laughs they get. But to be honest, I’m not sure how many people go to a Mortal Kombat movie for the storytelling.

On the positive side, instead of building the story around an unknown and mostly uninteresting new character like the first film, the sequel leans on franchise favorite Johnny Cage as a co-lead. He’s played by Karl Urban, whose seismic smirk, comical snark, and overall bad attitude puts an interesting spin on the character. Gone is the Cage’s signature narcissism. Instead, here he is a washed-up action star who makes his living signing autographs and selling DVD copies of his old movies at small conventions.

A second story thread follows Princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph). As a child, she witnessed her father’s death at the hands of the power-mad emperor Shao Kahn (a fittingly ominous Martyn Ford). The two faced off in Mortal Kombat with the fate of their realm on the line. Shao Kahn’s brutal victory gave him control of the realm, and he took Kitana to be his daughter. But as the years go by, Kitana trains and prepares for a moment where she might have her revenge on the oppressive emperor.

The two stories merge after Shao Kahn seeks to take control of Earthrealm. And he does so in the only way one settles such a conflict – through a tournament featuring one-on-one combat to the death. Kitana is chosen to be one of Shao Kahn’s five warriors. But Earthrealm has a problem – they are one fighter short. So Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), the protector of Earthrealm who selects and mentors the warriors who defend it, recruits a down-on-his-luck Johnny Cage to fight for Earth’s survival.

That is the story in a nutshell. There are some vague attempts at dramatic depth in Johnny’s road to redemption and Kitana’s attempt to unseat Shao Kahn and free her people. Both are welcomed, but neither move the needle much. That’s because the movie is much more interested in speeding through to the next fight while dropping in characters from the game for fans to check off. That’s almost enough to keep the movie afloat. The problem is the fights grow more repetitious instead of more exciting.

To its credit, “Mortal Kombat II” delivers some enjoyably gruesome fatalities, especially early on. And Karl Urban does a good job generating some legitimate laughs. But nearly everyone else are trapped in character skins so scantly defined that they barely register. So we’re left with a thinly sketched and overly crass feature that puts more energy into magical portals, ancient amulets, and stolen god powers than characters we want to root for or against. And once the fights start blurring together, there’s not much left for us to cling to.

VERDICT – 2 STARS