Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

By the mid-1990s, video game adaptations were arriving in cinemas with the regularity of buses, and with roughly the same artistic ambition. New Line Cinema had struck modest gold in 1995 with Mortal Kombat, a film that understood it was a bit silly and played to that sensibility with reasonable charm. The sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, arrived two years later in 1997 with a new director in John R. Leonetti (better known as a cinematographer, having worked extensively in that capacity before stepping behind the camera here) and a premise borrowed straight from the game mythology: the realms are merging, the villains are invading, and our heroes have exactly six days to stop total annihilation. Simple enough on paper, though, as you may gather, the execution is another matter entirely.

Leonetti inherited a franchise at something of a crossroads. The original film had been a polished but unremarkable piece of action fantasy that found its audience through a combination of nostalgia, tournament-fighter energy, and a certain knowing wink to the crowd. Annihilation, produced again through the partnership of New Line Cinema and Threshold Entertainment, had that goodwill to draw on and an expanded mythology to play with, including a wider roster of characters from the game series. Robin Shou returns as Liu Kang, and Talisa Soto is back as Kitana, but several other roles were recast entirely, with James Remar and Sandra Hess joining the ensemble alongside Brian Thompson as the menacing Shao Kahn. The resulting cast is a mix of familiar faces and new arrivals, thrown together into a production that, by any conventional measure, had reasonable resources to hand. Whether those resources ended up on screen is, well, the question the film never quite manages to answer convincingly. It is worth noting that for fans of action cinema from this era, you might recognise similar tensions between ambition and delivery in other films of the period, like the 1997 creature feature Anaconda, where spectacle and story are in a constant and not always friendly negotiation with each other.

What sets Annihilation apart from the routine misfires of its era is the particular flavour of its chaos. This is not a film that fails quietly or with any dignity. It swings for an operatic, effects-heavy fantasy epic and lands somewhere considerably south of that target, producing the kind of viewing experience that has kept it alive in conversations about genre cinema long after more competent films of the same year have been forgotten entirely. For those who enjoy action films that test the limits of the form, it is worth considering just how differently things can go: compare the raw kineticism of something like Hardcore Henry or the controlled fury of Mad Max: Fury Road and you begin to appreciate how much craft separates a memorable action film from one that simply makes a lot of noise. Annihilation occupies a very different corner of that spectrum, and it occupies it with a kind of reckless abandon that is, depending on your mood and your company, either exhausting or enormously entertaining.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation isn’t just a bad movie, it’s a full-on cinematic disaster that somehow defies the laws of logic, storytelling, and basic human dignity. The first Mortal Kombat (1995) had style, cheesy fun, and decent fight choreography. This 1997 sequel throws all of that away and replaces it with neon spandex, terrible dialogue, zero plot coherence, and special effects that look like they were rendered on a dial-up-era screensaver. The acting is wooden, the pacing is frantic yet somehow boring, and the entire film feels like someone described the plot of the first movie from memory after three energy drinks. Characters teleport between realms without explanation, Shao Kahn monologues like a rejected Saturday morning villain, and the romantic subplot between Liu Kang and Kitana is so awkward you’ll wish for another apocalypse just to end the scene. And yet… it’s so utterly, completely bad that it loops back around into being kind of hilarious. Watching it with friends, yelling at the screen, marvelling at how badly everything goes, it becomes a party experience. The sheer commitment to nonsense gives it a bizarre charm. I give it credit: few movies earn the title of “so bad it’s legendary.” This one doesn’t just wear the crown, it is the crown. And yes… flawless victory.

And honestly, that sums it up better than I ever could have managed on my own. There is a very short list of films that achieve a kind of perverse immortality through sheer, undiluted awfulness, and Annihilation has more than earned its place on it. I have sat through a fair few bad sequels in my time on this blog, films that squander goodwill and good source material in ways that leave you feeling vaguely robbed, but this one operates on a different frequency altogether. It is too committed to its own madness to be boring in any conventional sense, and too spectacularly misconceived to be forgettable. If you have a group of mates, a takeaway, and a low tolerance for pretension but a high tolerance for nonsense, this is your film. Just maybe have a palate cleanser ready for afterwards.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1997  | Watched: 2025-09-19

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Trailer

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