For Fans of Mortal Kombat

Paul W.S. Anderson's original Mortal Kombat film is not a great film. It is, however, a perfect film for what it is: a Saturday-morning cartoon scaled up to an R-adjacent PG-13, propelled by a relentless techno score and a cast committing completely to nonsense mythology. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung remains one of the great video-game-villain performances. The 2021 reboot brought the fatalities but lost the fun. The 1995 version understood that the game's appeal was never really shock; it was spectacle.

Most fighting games give you a roster of fighters. Mortal Kombat gave you an ongoing feud that spans lifetimes, deaths, resurrections, and betrayed truces. Scorpion, murdered by Sub-Zero and returned as a spectre of vengeance, only to discover the man he hunted was not the man he thought. The twist that Kuai Liang is not Bi-Han turned a simple revenge plot into genuine tragedy. No other fighting game has built that kind of serialized mythology around a single grudge match. The Scorpion's Revenge animated film is the cleanest version of this story.

NetherRealm Studios makes both Mortal Kombat and Injustice, and the DNA is unmistakable: cinematic story mode, massive roster, gear systems, and a willingness to do genuinely dark things to beloved characters. Injustice 2 is arguably the tighter game, with a campaign that asks what happens when Superman becomes a tyrant and Batman refuses to forgive him. If you have exhausted MK's current-gen titles, this is the clearest path to more of the same quality.

Gareth Evans's The Raid: Redemption does in live-action what Mortal Kombat does in games: it treats the human body as a machine that can be broken in spectacular and inventive ways, and it escalates relentlessly until the finale feels impossible to top. The Indonesian pencak silat on display is choreographically closer to MK's combat systems than most martial-arts films ever get. If you want the feeling of a fatality realized without CGI, start here.