Mortal Kombat Movie’s Gore Is Tasteful, Says Lewis Tan

[kardashian09]

The Mortal Kombat reboot will have plenty of the bloody, violent action fans are used to, but star Lewis Tan says the gore is still tasteful.

 

The Mortal Kombat reboot is plenty gory, but in a tasteful way, according to star Lewis Tan. The MK video games are notorious for their copious amounts of blood and brutally violent fatality finishing moves, which have become even more ridiculous with each successive entry in the series. That gory style is alive and well in the new live-action movie, but the creative minds behind Mortal Kombat have tried to keep it from becoming too extreme.

When the first Mortal Kombat game launched in arcades in 1992, it quickly became infamous for one main reason – the violence. The finishing moves featured in the game, known as fatalities by Mortal Kombat fans, are performed by executing a complex series of button-presses. This feature gained particular infamy for letting players brutalize their opponents after a victory by tearing their bodies to pieces or burning their carcass alive. Over the years, the Mortal Kombat franchise has upheld its reputation as one of the bloodiest series of games on the market. The more recent entries have taken the violence to bizarre, almost comical levels.

It's pretty safe to say that any bloodless Mortal Kombat movie would feel more than incomplete. And the viscera is definitely there in the reboot, but according to actor Lewis Tan, who plays Cole Young, the new movie is keeping things tasteful. In a recent interview with Variety, Tan spoke about the film’s level of violence. While he says the movie stays true to the games with a "hard R" level of gore, it does stop short of being too extreme for viewers. Read Tan’s full quote below:

“Hell yeah. That was one thing for sure that the director was adamant on. He was like, ‘This is going to be hard R. Try not to make it NC-17, but let’s take it all the way up until that point.’ And that’s what we did. But I think he did it really tastefully. He didn’t just try to be super gory and crazy. I’m not into all that, but I think if you’re going to do ‘Mortal Kombat’ correctly, you’ve got to have it.”

While the idea of tasteful gore in Mortal Kombat may sound a bit paradoxical, it's certainly possible. Television has taken a visceral turn over the past decade with the bloody battles of Game of Thrones and the savage killings in The Walking Dead working as prime examples of how bloody fantasy/sci-fi violence can still feel grounded if it works in the interest of the story. It’s easy to write gruesome fights for the sake of being gruesome; it’s far more challenging to craft a narrative that justifies its brutality.

Director Simon McQuoid has been outspoken throughout the leadup to Mortal Kombat’s release about his desire to tell a grounded, engaging story. The trailer footage that’s been released shows a movie that’s much more serious than the two ‘90s MK films, while still seeming to embrace the absurdity of the source material. Balancing the Mortal Kombat story and the violence may be its biggest challenge, but if the film handles it well, it could be one of the best video game movies to date. Mortal Kombat releases on April 23, simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max.