Critic Reviews
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
A martial arts action-adventure with wondrous special effects and witty production design, it effectively combines supernatural terror, a mythical slay-the-dragon, save-the-princess odyssey and even a spiritual quest for self-knowledge. [21 Aug 1995 Pg. F3]
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| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
It is one continuous fight sequence from opening scene to final credits, but lacks the blood, profanity, and gore that would have merited a more adult rating.
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| 70 |
The New York Times
The movie's extensive martial arts sequences, in which combatants bounce off each other doing triple handsprings, suggest a slightly more earthbound version of the aerial ballets in Hong Kong action-adventure films.
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| 70 |
Variety
But where others have sunk in the mire of imitation, director Paul Anderson and writer Kevin Droney effect a viable balance between exquisitely choreographed action and ironic visual and verbal counterpoint.
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| 63 |
TV Guide
Staff(not credited)
Expect lots of earsplitting music, garish visuals and badly staged martial arts action.
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| 60 |
Washington Post
Richard Harrington
A mix of martial-arts and special-effects magic, the film serves its nonstop confrontations either straight up or with a twist (as when they involve Kombatants with special powers, like Sub-Zero, Reptile and Scorpion).
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| 60 |
Empire
The filmmakers try to solve the problem of turning an experience which merely consists of a series of fights into a story by... ignoring it, presenting a film which merely consists of a series of fights.
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| 58 |
Entertainment Weekly
And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.
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| 50 |
The New Yorker
Bruce Diones
But soon the movie falls flat under an uninspired good-versus-evil plot and pathetically simpleminded dialogue.
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| 50 |
Austin Chronicle
It is, in essence, the video game transferred part and parcel to the screen, and very well at that.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Laura Evenson
Mortal Kombat the movie has everything a teenage boy could want: snakes that jut out of a villain's palms, acrobatic kung- fu fighting and a couple of battling babes. Everything, that is, but an interesting plot, decent dialogue and compelling acting
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| 50 |
USA Today
Just like the popular (and more graphically violent) video game it's spun from, kung-fooy and kartoony Kombat shoves plot and personality aside to focus on action cloaked in mystic mumbo-jumbo and gloomy mock-gothic graphics. [21 Aug 1995 Pg. 03.D]
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