Is this going to be… good?
Video game movies generally don’t work.
There are detailed Wikipedia pages dedicated to such endeavours, and you’re unlikely to find much to trouble the Academy Awards folk in there.
Long considered something of a cursed genre, the humble video game adaptation tends to fail for any number of reasons.
There’s cast and crew missteps, unnecessarily convoluted scripts written by people who never played the games, and the fact that it is admittedly difficult to capture the feel of playing the thing in a film where the viewer is having a static enough experience.
All that said, we live and hope that the upcoming Mortal Kombat reboot is going to be a bit of craic.
Reasons to be cheerful? First off, the 1995 effort is, while no classic, a lot of fun, so at least there’s something to build from.
Second, the team behind this one has potential. You’ve got James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Aquaman) producing and they’re assembling a hell of a cast.
Joe Taslim of The Raid and The Night Comes For Us is on board as Sub-Zero, while the most recent batch of casting – and the news that the thing is going to be R-rated – also put smiles on faces.
And now, thanks to a Variety exclusive, we know who will play both Scorpion and Shang Tsung, and they’re two actors you should be familiar enough with.
First up, Chin Han, who will be playing iconic series villain Shang Tsung. You might recognise him from such movies as The Dark Knight, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Skyscraper.
Then you have Scorpion, very much a fan favourite. Stepping into his orange-tinted shoes will be none other than Hiroyuki Sanada, who has brought tremendous presence to his roles in the original Ring, The Last Samurai, Sunshine, and LOST.
Throw in the great Tadanobu Asano as Raiden and our tickets are PURCHASED.
Well, not yet. They’re not on sale. But when they do, yeah, we’re in.
Mortal Kombat commences on 5 March, 2021.
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