If you’re one of the many who are hoping that the new Mortal Kombat live-action film reboot will finally crack the Hollywood video game movie curse, you’re probably going to be disappointed.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the James Wan-produced project has cast Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade and Josh Lawson playing Kano.
Now that’s all good and all, but here’s the worrying part of the report: Lewis Tan has been cast as an “undisclosed lead character.”
Uh, what?
Mortal Kombat has had an established line-up of characters throughout its 27-year existence with the only changes being the addition of new fighters every now and again. It’s not rocket science to work out who is going to be in every new game or the movie.
This means there’s simply no reason to hide the identity of a lead character because we already frigging know who they are. It’s either going to be Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Sonya Blade, Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), or one of the other seven or so characters who have been around since the first game.
Since most of those aforementioned main characters already cast, we’re left with two possibilities:
- Lewis is playing either Johnny Cage, Scorpion, Princess Kitana, Shang Tsung, Reptile, or Goro.
- Lewis is playing a new, original character.
Even with the dumb “undisclosed lead character” description, we can easily work out who Lewis is playing in the Mortal Kombat reboot by a simple process of elimination.
But since the filmmakers are going though this effort to hide Lewis’ character’s identity, this means we’re left with the possibility of Lewis playing some new character, which is stupidity of the highest order because no one is going to watch Mortal Kombat for some new fighter they’ve never heard of.
All this makes no sense because there’s simply no logical reason to announce that Lewis is playing “an undisclosed lead character,” and it’s a worrying sign that Hollywood may be screwing up yet another video game movie by adding unnecessary changes.
It would be a ridiculously dumb move if this is indeed the case, which is kind of weird to say about a movie that’s about killing people in hilariously gruesome ways, like shoving a grenade down someone’s throat or freezing them before ripping out their spine. Then again, Hollywood has never been good at the video game movie gig so we shouldn’t be too surprised.
Anyway, we’ll see whether Mortal Kombat is a flop or a winning fatality when filming gets underway in Adelaide in late 2019 for a March 5, 2021 release date.