After the events of the previous Mortal Kombat tournament, Liu Kang(Robin Shou) and his friends barely get the chance to enjoy their victory over Shang Tsung(Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). The Emperor of Outworld Shao Khan(Brian Thompson) together with his generals, invades the Earthrealm despite losing the tournament. Khan breaks the rules and the casualties begin early. The two realms begin to merge causing global destruction to Earth. Liu Kang and his companions only have six days to prevent the merger from being complete. The merger of realms is called Annihilation.

"Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" directed by John R. Leonetti, completely skips events from the videogame "Mortal Kombat 2". It instead uses the storyline plus combines elements from "Mortal Kombat 3","Mortal Kombat Trilogy", and "Mortal Kombat 4". The writers try to cram as many characters and story elements from these two games as possible. But in my view, the story is very far from the films downfall. It's the terrible special effects, very bad and boring fight choreography, bad acting, and characters serving no purpose only to die in battle. As a matter of fact unlike its predecessor, this film caters too much to fans of the game. This isn't really a problem for me being a fan. Had the fights at the very least been better, I could have gotten into the story.

Robin Shou reprises his role as Liu Kang along with Talisa Soto as Kitana. Kang and Kitana along with the surviving fighters must find a way to escape Khan's Extermination Squads and come up with a plan to prevent Annihilation. With the exception of these two, the entire cast is brand new. Sandra Hess in my view is a much better Sonya Blade, then the previous girl. Physically she is better and there's some type of life in her fight scenes. This also goes for Raiden now played by James Remar. Although more physically fit, he completely lacks the charisma Christopher Lambert brought to the character. All of the new characters are lacking that "it" factor to make them slightly interesting. And none of them are convincing in their roles at all. I will give credit to the characters appearances. They almost completely resemble their videogame counterparts.

The fight scenes were the biggest disappointment. There were far too many camera shifts, this was obviously meant to conceal just how bad these people are concerning martial arts. The action was very slow at times and incredibly lazy. This mainly concerned the women. Most notably Queen Sindel(Musetta Vander), martial arts clearly isn't her thing. This time around, although the soundtrack is once again very good, it does very little to help the fight scenes. This is mainly because the actors really aren't good to begin with. The fights are kept short and the camera shifts help spare us the agony.

This is a very boring film all around and it almost appears the director made it terrible on purpose. Characters appear and disappear as quick as they came. On top of that this film contains some of the worst dialogue, it actually provides a few laughs but not when it's suppose to. And the ending... Seriously, words escape me for the moment.

It's sad really, and I'm not talking about how the film turned out. I say it's sad because anyone who enjoyed the original "Mortal Kombat", is going to let curiosity take over. The first one ends with an open ending and this terrible sequel closes the chapter. I can only recommend this to straight die hard fans, the so bad it's good crowd, and for completion sake. I set my expectations very low after watching this film again for the first time in over ten years. And it still came as a shock. This is truly bottom of the barrel here folks, and the scary thing is. I've seen much worst.

Here are better martial art films to choose from:

Black Belt
Fist Of Legend

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD