Hello everyone, this is Shane Armin row, you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is Saturday, April 27 2021. And I am on my way to pick my son up from a birthday party. little small gathering. So yeah, so I thought, listen, I got a 30 minute window, why not jump on the phone and do a show? All right, well, then, let me see. Let me see which way Google is telling me to go. Alright, cool. The same way I went when I dropped them off. You know, having So Brian was in my son was in another school district, our my wife works out in the dice Art School District. So, you know, most of his early formidable years was was spent out there. And so a lot of his friends and classmates and everything are still from out there, even though now he is. He goes to school, nearby the house. You say I’m trying to get on, get it off from the turn off here. haven’t driven at night in a while. It feels kind of weird. I guess that’s just something that you you sort of lose a skill set for, you know, your eyes sort of adjusting at night and being cognizant of that. But yeah, so anytime that there’s you know, birthdays or celebrations, it’s always one of it’s not one of his friends locally. Now. And I know it’s got to be one of his friends out in surprise. But you know, it said 16 mile 36 minute trip even in the frickin den at night like this. So anyway, I guess that’s okay, though. You know, I remember my parents running me all over hell and back again, trying to get me to my friend’s house too. So at some point, within a couple of years, you’ll have a car he’ll be able to drive. Hey, oh, Bruce willards in the house. I wasn’t expecting to get anybody live tonight. So that’s kind of cool. We got somebody in the chat room. So yeah, so that’s why I’m out in the you know, it’s not the middle of the night. But it’s, it’s late for me to be out and about running around. So yeah, that’s why we’re here. That’s why we got the show running. And so I guess I guess the big thing we need to talk about is the new Mortal Kombat movie. Now the big Mortal Kombat fan, I was a fan of the 1995 original film. Hey, Margie, what’s up? My, my, my likings of Mortal Kombat two are slim, where I saw the original Mortal Kombat movie, probably 100 plus times in the theater. I know that sounds like it could be a little hyperbole, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. And I’ll give you a little backstory on that. When I was in the Navy, and our families who transferred to our next duty station, a lot of us had a lot of free time, our wives and our families were gone. So we had time to do stuff. And as I recall, we spent a lot of time going to the dollar movie theater was either on base or near the base, I don’t remember but it was like $1 to see, you know, all of these decent movies I saw on Tombstone, they’re a bunch of times, if I remember right, Mortal Kombat was like, there was a handful of them that I saw, like over and over and over and over and over and over again. But anyway, so so I seen the 1995 movie a lot. And I find myself getting crotchety year by the year. And my tolerance for modern Motion Picture making is very, very low. And I’ve admitted to myself that I am not a fan of the way that filmmaking as a as a majority audience of filmmaker type scenarios, the summer blockbuster they all it’s also formulaic, it’s also CG, it’s also nonsense. It’s just, I don’t know. And listen, I understand that there’s a whole wide world of independent films and not everything is a CGI wire foo fuck fest out there. I get it. And I watch I actually watch a lot of those. Although, as I’ve mentioned here on the show, I spent a lot more time these days watching documentaries. Because I want to know about stuff that I care about. Not watch movies about stuff that I don’t care about. So anyway, um, so Mortal Kombat has been has been sort of touted as this love letter to the fans. It’s supposed to be received. back full. It’s supposed to you know, it’s supposed to you’re supposed to be this Colossus you’re this great legendary thing and yet he gains but yeah, so it’s like alright Listen, I owe the property I owe the property the the time to sit down and watch this film and I did. And so I will share with you first for those of you who are maybe listening you don’t have a whole bunch of free time and what’s what’s the brass tacks? What’s the bottom line? The bottom line is it’s not a dumpster fire, which is exactly what I expected it to be. These days one of the highest honors I can bestow upon modern motion pictures is that it’s not a dumpster fire. The Star Wars movies new Star Wars movies dumpster fire, pretty much everything that comes out from Marvel In my opinion, dumpster fire. Pretty much everything that comes out from DC dumpster fire. It’s just I’m not I don’t like it. So, in this case, it’s like Alright, well, let’s see what wiki let’s see what we got here. I’m going to completely avoid I’m not going to completely avoid spoilers. I’m going to avoid as many spoilers as humanly possible. If for some reason you’re worried about a spoiler, you might you might shut this off just in case I slip I don’t plan to but I am driving after all. I’ll do my best not to not to produce any spoilers, but I understand if you shut off and you want to watch the movie on your own, and then you can come back. So first off the main, the main character in this show in this movie is not somebody from the Mortal Kombat era. And most most of us have the Mortal Kombat fan loving persuasion. do not understand why, oh, why would you insert somebody? First off, you insert somebody who doesn’t exist in the in the IP, which is goofy as hell. Because Listen, there’s a there’s 50 million people in this IP you could pick from, right. So it’s like, I don’t get it. And then the characters completely uninteresting. There’s not an interesting thing about this character. There’s, you have you know, you’re supposed to be you’re supposed to commiserate with them. You’re supposed to feel sympathetic to them empathy, blah, blah, blah, standard movie making one on one. I haven’t found anybody who’s watched this movie that felt even a twinge of interest in this character, not sympathetic, not anything. And, you know, I don’t know. It’s not, it’s not the actor per se. You know, he’s a good looking young Dude, you know, so it’s not like they did a weird miscasting, it’s just characters not that interesting. And if this guy, this guy’s some sort of an Academy Award winning actor, which I don’t know if that’s Trump, you’re saying, if that’s the case, he had very little to work with here. So we’ve got we’ve got the main you know, protagonist being boring as shit. You then have the main antagonist. Right? Okay. Listen, we all know the Mortal Kombat deal. Shang song is like the major more you know, the major antagonist in the film, right? Well, he’s about as interesting as the protagonist. Say what you want about the original Shang song, the one that I can’t remember the guys name. I apologize. I should have this written down. The original Shang son. Oh, okay. So he was a little over the top a little bit, you know, but, but frankly, he had the presence and he had the demeanor. This, this Shang son, I just couldn’t give a rat’s ass about to save my life. He’s not scary. He’s not for booting. He’s not you know, he doesn’t he doesn’t lay any. It’s throwing. And yet he’s supposed to be the main bad guy. He’s the throwaway guy. So we’ve got both major sides of the coin, for a way. So what does that leave you with and leaves you with the supporting cast? Not all of which are dumpster fires, but some of them are. Some of them are simply not used to their fullest potential. Overall, though, I will say that the supporting cast has to carry the movie on their own and for the most part, they do and that and thank God for that because otherwise we’d be screwed. We wouldn’t have a movie here at all. Right, hang on a second. Let me merge in here with this other traffic. So Alright, so what does that leave us with? We have these we have these these ancillary characters. So I’m trying to think of I mean, what was it a spoiler to know who’s in here? I don’t think so. So, we’ve got Sonia, we’ve got Jax, we’ve got kaino we’ve got There’s there’s a few more those are the ones you’ve probably seen on the trailer. So I don’t think I’m and of course sub zero and Scorpion, right because for some reason Mortal Kombat revolves around those two characters. And frankly, I’ve never understood why neither one of them are particularly interesting characters in my opinion. So so you have you have the main roster error was like, was Johnny Cage in there? It’s, it’s sort of a spoiler, whether he’s in there or not. And so I would rather leave that for you to find out on your own. But, you know, I’ve tried to think of who else I can tell you about that wouldn’t be a spoiler. There’s there are other familiar faces that show up. So let’s talk about rain does you know ravens got to be here? You know, that’s not that’s not a shocker. So in 1995, Raven was played by the amazing Christopher Lambert and let’s be honest, Christopher Lambert owned that fucking part completely. I could not imagine for a second then even bothering with a mortal kombat two, if Lambert wasn’t involved. Well, Lambert, of course, was replaced, or was superseded in Mortal Kombat two by a very good actor, by the way, James remar, a huge fan of James remar, loving LOVE THE LOVE THE LOVE the actor, does tons of good stuff. Big fan of his work, but Raiden he’s not. Listen, maybe he would have been fine. Had we not had Christopher Lambert upfront, you know what I’m saying? Once you’ve had Christopher Lambert, or jack nicholson, or any of these other, you know, super character actors inside of a role, it’s really hard to see it to go somewhere else. But that doesn’t mean that they could not have come up with a really good rating. Much like the other primary characters ratings is throwaway. It’s like this rating. There’s like nothing interesting at all about rating. And it’s like, this is the fucking Thunder God, the God of lightning and thunder p should be interesting. We should give a shit about him. We shouldn’t be interested in his background. We should be interested in all that. But the truth is, we don’t care about him. I didn’t anyway, it’s just like, Okay, I’m trying. It’s like Alexander stars. Our guard is Randall Flagg in the new stand. You know, maybe if I hadn’t had some other frame of reference, I might have been able to swallow it. But no. So listen, it’s not that they’re, they’re bad. It’s just it’s not. It’s thrown away. It’s just disposable. And that and that kind of sucks. Now, let’s talk. So now now that I’ve talked about what I feel okay, in the storyline, listen, the storyline from the 1995 movie was just as paper thin as this one. We are enchanted to be able to sneak a peek into a little bit of character history. In fact, the first 10 minutes of this movie 1012 minutes in the movie will look like it’s done by a complete it looks like it’s from a different movie, the first 10 minutes and the rest of the movie, look feel. And it’s like it’s like they, they they they got a different director, they got different everything. And they shot the first 10 minutes, sort of like a creep show or one of those anthology movies where they have different, you know, different directors, different producers, different story writers, and they chained them all together with a frickin cat. something of that nature. But in the end, you watch that first 10 minutes, and then when the movie flips over, and you’re back to you know, current day or whatever, you’ll you’ll you’ll go Wow. I mean, I was I was in and I’m not sure I’m still in. I mean, I liked what I just saw. Now, I’m not sure I like what’s going on now. So you’ve got like the first 10 minutes which you’re like, Okay, I, I see where we’re going with this and I’m in Alright, cool. And then you’ve got like 1015 minutes where it’s like, I’m not sure I’m in. I think I might I think I might have to bail. I mean, that’s too bad. I was enjoying this. And then it picks back up and and you know, the movie picks up and you’re reengaged you’re really interested. But again, from a storyline point of view. I kind of I do like the twist that they made right? The original 1995 movie was them at the tournament, fighting for the fate of the world blah blah, blah, standard fare. This is before the tournament. Now your Sunday might have been a spoiler but I hope not. So this storyline is like a pre tournament workout. And I liked I liked what they did with that I thought that was clever. And there’s a twist in there and I won’t I won’t reveal that but there’s a twist in there was like Okay, now I get what they’re doing that now I get it. I was I was lost at first but I’m okay. Now, I think I mean for now. So where does the movie actually shines? I keep talking about everything I didn’t like about it. What did I like about it? Well, let’s talk about the fight scenes, because let’s be honest, Mortal Kombat is about fighting. It’s about fatalities. It’s about Gore. It’s about blood. Don’t you worry about a thing when it comes to blood, gore and violence. It’s all there. It’s all there. And it’s Primo. It’s, it’s what you would hope to see, listen, there’s no, there’s no, you know, the profanities in there. The, you know, the adult situations are in there everything that you would need from an R rated movie, it’s in there. So don’t worry about that piece of the equation. Now, what I do, what I will complain about with regards to with the fights is that, and this is this is a standard across the board Hollywood thing as of late. There are a handful of movies of recent note that pull off good type martial art combat sequences, where it doesn’t look like over choreographed superstay stage wouldn’t ask fighting. So if you go pull, go pull any be Japanese martial art movie off the shelf, just pick one at random, and watch the fight scenes and they’re all better than Mortal Kombat. They’re all better than almost every movie that’s come out in the last 10 years. Because there’s a fluidity and a style. And it’s it’s a complete To me, it’s a completely it’s a complete different thing to watch. Awesome martial artists at work. Versus actors who train for two to two to six weeks, get some basics, and they do it over and over again on film until it looks right. And that’s and that’s kind of what we’re talking about. Right? You know, there was a period of time. And just to kind of, to segue just a little bit is there was the the last action heroes documentary I talked about a while back, they discussed this, and they explained it in a most excellent way. In the earlier days of the martial art films. They hired actual martial artists, right, they hired martial artists to do martial art movies. Now, a lot of them were very good actors. I mean, they were okay actors. But frankly, they could be better. Unfortunately, they decided that instead of doing instead of hiring, actual martial arts, artists that have been doing this for 22 decades, and are masters of their craft, will instead hire the good actors and will teach them enough martial arts or will teach them enough, or will shoot it in a manner that makes them look proficient. And that’s if you talk to any of these older martial art, celebrities, they’ll all sort of tell you the same thing. That that’s how the market decided to move. And unfortunate and sometimes it works. Like, like, look at john wick. john wick has amazing fight sequences. They don’t feel choreographed. They don’t feel staged. They don’t feel I’m the one I guess, is the best thing I can tell you. But unfortunately, you know, that’s not what we have here. Everything feels very choreographed and very staged. And I went back just to make sure that I didn’t I wasn’t, you know, I’m not I’m not looking through rose colored glasses. I went back and looked at some clips from Mortal Kombat one and two from the 90s. Just to make sure that I wasn’t reading too much into it. And yeah, I you can tell watching Mortal Kombat two and one, that the people that got into costumes doing the martial arts, they’re like the real deal. And you can tell I mean, you can tell that the people doing that are the real deal. And the ones that aren’t, you can still tell but most of them are. And it’s, it’s it’s apparent, it’s evident. And so what you have is a situation where you don’t listen, if if fighting was a 10th of the film, right? There’s there’s a couple of needed action sequences, we needed the action sequences. We did the best we could. But when it when the whole movie is literally Mortal Kombat that’s all about fighting. You would expect it to be better, I guess, for the lack of a better term. Does it does it mean it totally sucks. No, it’s just, it’s just it’s something that stands out to me and maybe it won’t to you. They were very respectful I felt in terms of CGI usage and wire foo usage. Listen, it’s fantasy combat. So in some cases, you can say to your Listen, when when when you when you have magic involved or supernatural shit involved, then you have to do something to compensate for the lack of a human’s ability to fucking fly, right? You have to do something to you know, you have to do something to to show this guy with no fucking arms, having arms. I mean, you have to do something with that in order to make it work and you know, so they use the CGI, they use the wire foo. But for the most part, they tempered it well. And you can tell there were there was like one or two sequences there was just like, Dude, come on. That looks really bad. I mean, you guys couldn’t have done that a second time because it looks pretty bad. But for the most part, it was fairly respectful. And that’s coming from me Mister, no CGI, no wire foodshed. But listen, again, you’re talking about the supernatural stuff involved, you have to let them have a little bit of slack. And in this case, they did a pretty good job, I’m not going to complain. The CG was used most of the CG use was organic that I saw anyway, that’s things like fire, ice, things of that nature. And we know, we know CG can be used responsibly. Unfortunately, they just don’t tend to do it. There are a couple of full CG characters. And they work out okay, there’s two of them that I can think of right off the top of my head. And I won’t ruin it by telling you who they are. There are two of them. And one of them looks better than the other. So I know I understand what they were going for. I’m okay, listen, I got through it. I mean, quite frankly, you know, the Marvel CG characters look worse than this one day, in my opinion. Everything that I’ve seen from recent Marvel movies where they use full CG characters, this one looked better than those. So go figure. But still, you know, there’s a there’s a problem when you when you create that sort of the character that’s fully CG your eyes? Don’t my eyes, my mind doesn’t my mind can’t buy it. But I can handle the organic stuff. And like I said they were they did a pretty good job. I will I will give them I will give them their due. Let’s see. So fights. Story characters. Yeah. There’s there’s a, there’s a couple of like, WTF things in there. But you know, listen, I mean, that’s pretty much every movie these days. You got to you got to give them one or two passes, right. It’s just like, what, come on. In terms of the Lord, though, in terms of like, if you’re a mortal kombat lover, will this movie and sold you? I don’t think so. It’s more of a waste of an opportunity than it is an insult. Yeah, having the main character be somebody completely outside the IP. Yeah, that’s, you should be pissed about that. And I think a lot of people are, which is why the director just came out. I started reading some stuff on this earlier today, where the director basically said, we were told by the studio to do that. We were told by Warner Brothers, we had to have somebody not involved with the Mortal Kombat, IP to be our exposition, you know, somebody who can be outside of it, they can explain to the audience what all this says, right? And that’s, and that’s exactly what he’s there for. Right? And that’s, you’ll, you’ll see that you’ll go Oh, yeah, so he’s here to be the audience’s conduit into Mortal Kombat, because not everybody watching this movie has played all the games or they understand the lore. So we need somebody to plug this in. Now, you could have done that a million different ways without taking your protagonist and making him your, you know, your expository vassal, right. But listen, whatever the characters throw away, I hope to god we never see him again, I hope that they just throw him away and get somebody else for the next one, because we don’t need him anymore. If they’re going to do another one. Make him go away. So let’s see. Okay, so the other things that I liked him so let me talk about the strong points of the film. Well, I sort of told you about part of it was that, you know, they were respectful. So there’s tons of Easter eggs hidden all over the place. There are there is incidental music that does relate back to the Mortal Kombat original theme. It’s very subtle. And unless you’re paying really close attention, you’re probably not going to see it. I’m going to say my son’s pinging me here. Just let him know where I’m at. Doing set. So anyway, um, so I was Listen, I knew they weren’t going to take the 90s techno track and put it in there. That was pretty much a given. But I was hoping that there would be an homage at least to the original score and there was a very, very small, very, very light. You’ll get more during the closing credits, but it’s not. It’s not what you would hope it was not me. It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s fine, whatever. Lots of hat tips, there’s some very witty dialogue and, and I’ll be honest with you, anytime that came out, anytime that keynote was on the screen, keep your ears open. Because too, to be honest with you, kaino stole the whole frickin show. And, you know, listen, he that’s that kind of character. It’s that butcher from the last book from the boys Lost Boys from the boys. It says the character is just ripe for enjoyment. And they do a great job. He’s got the best lines. He’s got the best writing. So, you know, anytime he’s present, just keep your ears open. Plenty of great quips, plenty of little tiny nudges. It’s, it’s great. So Keno steals the show. And like I said, some very, very clever witty writing. So I’ve got to give them that good stuff. Congratulations on on that piece of the equation. So again, so it’s not a dumpster fire. I mean, listen, the last Jedi was a dumpster fire. The Force Awakens. I mean, when I first saw it, I thought it was okay. The more I The more I sit and think about it, though, the more I think it’s a dumpster fire too. But you know, they didn’t. They didn’t really try to like negate anything. They didn’t try to counter any cannon. You know what I mean? It’s not like, it’s not like Star Trek, where their whole point was to essentially erase everything that happened. So they can completely rewrite the show, you know what I mean? So there’s, there’s none of that going on. So it didn’t it didn’t piss me off. And I sat through the whole thing, which is something I can tell you right now does not happen very often. And I give it my not a dumpster fire rating. And I will also own it on blu ray, or 4k when it comes out. I will I will own it. I will have a physical media copy of it, which is probably the highest form of flattery that a film can have these days is I will definitely own it. It wasn’t a dumpster fire, and it’s now part of the Mortal Kombat legacy. So yeah, so there you go. That’s, that’s my take on the new Mortal Kombat movie worth seeing. Definitely. Keep your expectations in check. Let’s see. Don’t keep your expectations in check. Keep your ears open when kaino is in the scene. And yeah, don’t don’t expect too much. And keep a lookout for the Easter eggs are all over the place. It’s like frickin them. It’s like frickin I guess it’s like Easter, right? It’s there’s a rabbit running around leaving Mortal Kombat easter eggs. And they’re good. They’re good. A lot of them are really good. Some of them are actually very subtle, which I thought was cool, too. But yeah, the entire the entire bad guy clan. didn’t care about any of them. I mean, let’s be honest. Again, I don’t want to I don’t want to. I don’t want to give any spoilers away. There is one more good, bad guy. And I don’t want to say who it is because I didn’t know he was in it. Sorry, it was he I already actually use the pronoun game. Right? They were in it. And there’s one other there’s one bad guy that’s actually and of course, he’s basically the Boba Fett of this movie. You’re like, hey, all right. I like this. Wait a minute. That’s how we get you know what I’m saying is sort of like, again, wasted opportunity. is how I felt about it. There was a lot of you they could have done so much more. But at least they didn’t erase anything that we cared about other than putting this poll young dude in. And his wife’s kind of hot. So you know, at least we had heard a look at Sonia. At first I thought she was pretty hot but then it’s like you know, I think they did the right thing by not making her super hot because you don’t want to make you don’t want to make I might end up with a spoiler in here somewhere. I don’t I don’t want to I don’t want to give you more spoilers so I’m gonna leave it at that. That’s my Um, so my micro review of, of Mortal Kombat. I listen, I’m closing in on my son’s my son’s pick up so I’m gonna leave it I’m gonna leave it here. I hope you enjoyed my look at Mortal Kombat. And this is Shane R. Monroe with passer see radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care, everybody.
Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2021-04-24
