The humble video game adaptation is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, and yet the genre is still struggling to find any sort of consistent quality. Ironically given that the genre quickly became his bread and butter for better or worse, it was Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat that showed the pretenders to the throne how it should be done.
Admittedly, it was only the fourth live-action feature film based on an existing console property that only rustled up a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45 percent, but you need to look at it objectively. Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, and Street Fighter were all reprehensible movies, and Mortal Kombat‘s rating on the aggregation site is almost as high as the aforementioned trio combined.
Not only that, but it spent 20 years reigning as the best-reviewed entry in the genre’s entire history from Rotten Tomatoes’ formation in 1998 until Dwayne Johnson’s Rampage came along two decades later, while a $124 million tally at the box office was a high point for the medium until Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived in 2001.
That’s a decent legacy to leave behind, especially when we’re talking about a cheese-filled cult classic more than capable of stirring up warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia in an entire generation. Streaming subscribers appear to be in the mood for thumping techno and sketchy CGI, then, seeing as FlixPatrol has outed Mortal Kombat as one of the most popular films among Prime Video subscribers in the United Kingdom this week.
