The first Mortal Kombat movie, back in 2021, made one famously strange choice: it never held the tournament. Two hours of gathering fighters and training them, and the actual Mortal Kombat got pushed to a sequel that took five years to show up. Mortal Kombat II, on HBO Max since July 24 after a 129 million dollar theatrical run, is that sequel, and it settles the debt in its opening stretch. It finally stages the tournament. Then it does something blunter than fans expected. It kills off the hero the first movie invented to carry it.
The Tournament the First Movie Owed You
The 2021 film spent its runtime assembling Earthrealm's champions and teasing a fight it never delivered, so the one job a sequel had was to hold the real thing. The tournament is what the name promises, the ritual the games are named for, and skipping it in a Mortal Kombat movie was a little like a heist film that ends before the vault. Mortal Kombat II delivers, staging it across three fronts at once: Raiden's Sky Temple, the fallen kingdom of Edenia, and the Netherrealm. The stakes are simple once you reduce the mythology to one object. Shao Kahn, the Outworld emperor, has claimed the Amulet of Shinnok, which makes him effectively immortal, so beating him is not a matter of landing a better hit. It is a race to destroy the amulet before he conquers Earthrealm for good.
Who Dies, Starting With Cole Young
Cole Young dies first, and he dies badly. Shao Kahn's hammer obliterates his head, his body drops into a pit of acid, and the movie makes a point of never returning to him. That bluntness is the message. Cole was invented for the 2021 film, a brand new fighter written in so newcomers had a blank slate to follow into a crowded mythology, and a lot of fans spent that movie wishing the camera would turn to the characters they actually came for. Cole even carried the first film's central arc, the reveal that he descends from the ninja Scorpion and the special power that came with it, and the sequel drops every bit of that into the acid along with him. Mortal Kombat II heard them. Killing Cole this early, this cheaply, clears the stage for Johnny Cage, the arrogant Hollywood action star from the games, played here by Karl Urban as the new lead. The rest of the losses arrive in the same run. Liu Kang is impaled by Shao Kahn but converts into Fire God energy and descends into the Netherrealm rather than simply dying. Jax is killed outright. Scorpion kills Noob Saibot, the wraith who was once his brother Bi-Han.
How Shao Kahn Actually Falls
The amulet decides everything, and Johnny Cage is the one who breaks it. Doubted for most of the movie as a preening lightweight, he finally unlocks his arcana, the inner power each champion has to earn, and lands the shadow kick that shatters the Amulet of Shinnok. That strips Shao Kahn of his immortality. Kitana, the emperor's captive stepdaughter, has already turned against him once she is freed, and with the double agent Jade at her side she delivers the finish, slicing Shao Kahn's head apart. She takes the Edenian throne as its new queen. The film closes on the fighters left standing, Johnny and Kitana and Jade and Baraka and Kano, plus the necromancer Quan Chi locked in a cell, a final frame arranged to look a great deal like a game's character select screen.
Is There a Post-Credits Scene?
No. This is the question most people carry into the theater, and I had it too. The answer is that Mortal Kombat II does not have a post-credits scene. The credits run over animation scored to a remix of the series' Techno Syndrome theme, and once they start there is nothing waiting at the end. The sequel setup sits inside the film instead. Johnny Cage waves off his old life with a line about how Hollywood can wait, keeping him in the war. Quan Chi glowers from his cell as the obvious next threat. And screenwriter Jeremy Slater has said an early draft of a third film already exists, shaped by what fans responded to this time. If Mortal Kombat III arrives, the pieces are already on the board.
For a franchise, that is a remarkable amount of self-correction packed into one movie. Mortal Kombat II hands fans the tournament the first film withheld, and it buys the goodwill by erasing the character the first film asked them to care about. It is a sequel built as an apology, and the strange thing is how well the apology plays.
If you like a movie that rebuilds its own ending from the ground up, another recent HBO Max release tore up its source's finish and swapped in a new one.
And if it is the sequel that finally lets the game play out that draws you, this summer had another one built on exactly that idea.
