Mortal Kombat looks quite enough to keep you engaged several hours.

In the fiction of this new Mortal Kombat film, I like to envision there’s an entire team of laborers employed by thunder god Raiden to set up the lighting for the competition field. Floodlights with shaded gel channels to set the disposition. Lights for climate. Perhaps a couple of large honkin’ spotlights to ensure everybody knows it’s battle night.

It must’ve been as disillusioning for them as it was for me when the warriors chose not to try sitting tight for a field and simply beginning killing each other in whatever dim back street, dull sanctuary, or dim house they turned out to be in at that point. The lighting association won’t fail to remember this double-crossing!

Regardless of whether to help shroud its CG impacts or to set a dim and genuine tone, the new Mortal Kombat appears to happen only around evening time. It even starts in a profoundly concealed woodland in medieval Japan, recounting the beginning story of the heroes who will at last become Scorpion and Sub-Zero.

In this telling, Scorpion is an expert ninja and kind dad named Hanzo Hasashi; Sub-Zero is a Chinese executioner named Bi-Han, who is, for reasons unexplained, fixated on finishing Hasashi’s bloodline.

He thinks he prevails by slaughtering Hasashi and his better half and child, yet an infant girl lives, in the end passing that bloodline down to a not-awesome MMA contender named Cole Young. Hasashi, then, goes through the following 400 years hanging out in damnation turning out to be Scorpion, which amusingly winds up making him a lot cooler.

Cole is our crowd proxy in this film, the typical person tossed into the fight to save Earthrealm from Outworld. Mortal Kombat needs somebody to look confounded when another person—for this situation an all-around educated Sonya Blade—rapidly clarifies different universes, secret competitions, picked champions, yakking yak.

Taslim brings an impressive screen presence as Sub-Zero, yet it seems like he’s kept away from having the option to do the sort of movement you find in an incredible hand to hand fighting flick. Time and again characters get thrown around rather than killed, or disregard wounds as opposed to faltering from them.

Here, characters need to present long enough to flaunt whatever move from the game they’re going to pull. The victor in each battle feels destined, regardless of whether they look smooth while they’re working out. There’s not much strain, as such, but rather a pleasant Hollywood sheen makes the unavoidable engaging.

Furthermore, at any rate the film holds back something special for later: a definitive confrontation with Sub-Zero in a shimmering cold field finds some kind of harmony between showy powers and clear hand-to-hand kombat. Perhaps they were simply saving the greater part of the lighting for the end.

There are fatalities, and they’re fun—however the CG blood showers and spilled guts look about as cartoony here as they do in the games. For its R rating, Mortal Kombat truly could’ve gone more enthusiastically. However, eventually, I had the opportunity to watch my kid Kung Lao cut somebody down the middle with his cap and afterward slide it back on his head, actually dribbling with gore. By videogame film guidelines, I’m calling that a success.