Mortal Kombat II

Remember the start of "Galaxy Quest" (1999) when a group of actors are drafted in to help rescue the universe from a nasty megalomaniac bent on intergalactic domination? Well, this time it's poor old "Johnny Cage" (Karl Urban) who's the past his sell-by-date Thespian reluctantly recruited by "Lord Raiden" (Tadanobu Asano) to help save the Earth realm from certain doom. He is to join four other somewhat sceptical fighters, all with various skills, to combat the five soldiers of "Shao Kahn" (Martyn Ford) who has been hitherto indestructable as the princess "Kitana" (Adeline Rudolph) can attest having seen her father slain when her own kingdom fell. Now adopted and trained by this nemesis, and together with her formidable friend "Jade" (Tati Gabrielle), she looks certain to reduce "Johnny" and his cohort to dust. Things become even more doom-laden when an all-powerful amulet is accidentally delivered by Aussie rogue "Kano" (Josh Lawson) into the hands of the khan and getting this sorted out is going to take them all to the perilous netherworld for quite a battle royal. Now this is really quite a good fun action adventure if you take it on face value, and it is certainly no worse than than the first of these Simon McQuoid outings from five years ago, but the dialogue is pretty torrid and even though he looks like his tongue is fixed firmly in his cheek, Urban just hasn't the charisma to pull this off and so he does really rather let this down. That said, along the way there are plenty of homages to other films in this genre; the visual effects are pretty spectactular and there are loads of perfectly choreographed and acrobatically staged combat scenes that are straight out of "Kung Fu Panda" to keep us entertained as the plot heads in a fairly predicable direction. Not great, no - but it passes two hours easily enough.

Unbearably, tooth-achingly bad. Now, you can only do so much with a plot of a computer game from the early 90s that has been filmed umpteen times already, but this is a new low. And a cleaned up, one-dimensional version of Butcher can't save it. Just no.