The problem with Mortal Kombat: Annihilation isn't that it's stupid, with no significant plot, dialogue or characters. That is undebatably true of Annihilation, but that was also true with the first Mortal Kombat movie, and that was a great movie. The problem is the HUGE let down in the martial arts and special effects scenes. MK had some terrific fight scenes, such as the brilliant Cage/Scorpion fight in the forest, the great Liu Kang/SubZero fight, and the cool finale with Shang Tsung. Annihilation didn't have any fight scenes up to the quality of those three, many of the fight scenes made no sense, and the finale was horrible. In addition, some things in Annihilation I would really like an explanation for:
- Why did Raiden dress up like Aladdin half way through the movie? Was looking like a complete dork part of becoming mortal? And where was Christopher Lambert, anyway?
- What was the third test? Where did that Wolf-guy go? What happened to Sub-Zero?
- Why did they do that stupid thing with Jax' bionic arms? Stupid movies should admit they are stupid movies. Stupid movies which try to have serious elemends become bad movies.
- Same deal with Katana's mother.
- What was point of that huge monster that came out of nowhere to attack Sonya, then immediately went back to it's whole when Jax hit it on the head? Was it a whack-a-mole?
- How is it that Sonya and Jade began to fight IN A DESERT and they immediately fell into a mud pit?
- Why did Smoke maticulously break every window in that random building before fighting Sonya and Jax?
- What was the point of having Liu Kang turn into a dragon? He just turned into a human again, without having done anything effective as a dragon. How was that useful?
- Why didn't they spend more then $80 on the special effects for that dragon? I could do better then that with miniatures and clay animation.
- How is it that this movie could have been made so badly, with such bad cinematography and such pathetic martial arts effects, after the first one was so good?