I would love to get a copy of the Mortal Kombat rulebook

. Is there a rulebook? In Mortal Kombat (2021), like Mortal Kombat (1995), a deadly tournament determines the fate of “Earthrealm” (AKA Earth) and “Outworld” (AKA a nebulous hellscape populated entirely by weirdos with gruesome fighting abilities). Supposedly, if either realm wins ten straight Mortal Kombat tournaments, they earn the right to invade the other. Seeing as how Outworld is a barren wasteland, this is not great prize for Earth, but it’s a hell of an incentive for Outworld — and in the Mortal Kombat movies, they always seem to be one more victory away from ultimate triumph.

But the actual rules of the tournament are ... nonexistent? I’m honestly not sure we ever see Mortal Kombat in the new Mortal Kombat film. The characters fight, many die, but no one ever lays out the format (Round robin? Single elimination?) or keeps tabs on the score. The bad guys, led by Shang Tsung (Chin Han), keep breaking the rules by trying to kill Earth’s champions before the tournament begins. The good guys yell “You’re breaking the rules!” but there’s no apparent repercussions for sending your minions to preemptively rip off your opponents arms or heads. So Shang Tsung just keeps doing it. Can you blame him? Pro wrestling has more strictly enforced “rules.”

I say this not to nitpick, but to observe that 2021’s Mortal Kombat, slick as it is, it doesn’t carry a lot of stakes — because it’s never entirely clear exactly what the stakes are. Is Earth on the verge of losing the tournament? Has the tournament even started? Who knows.

One must not think too deeply about these things, or much of anything, to enjoy this Mortal Kombat. As directed by first-time feature filmmaker (and longtime commercial veteran) Simon McQuoid, the movie applies a gloss of high-budget gravitas to the venerable fighting game. 1995’s Mortal Kombat movie was barely a notch or two above a grindhouse flick, with special effects that would have barely passed muster in the original arcade game. 2021’s update comes with impressive CGI and artful splashes of blood amidst its careful recreations of the games’ core cast and violence. While it doesn’t add up to very much beyond a high-end recreation of the game series’ vibe and aesthetics, it does look mighty good.

Curiously, the focus of this tribute to the Midway video games is a totally new character who never appeared in any of the earlier iterations. That’s Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a family man and washed up MMA fighter who just-so-happens to bear a birthmark that looks like the dragon logo from the Mortal Kombat video games. The mark means he’s been selected to defend Earth in Mortal Kombat — if he can survive long enough to get there. Shang Tsung decides he can’t lose a fight to Earth’s champions if all of Earth‘s champions are already dead, and sends his icy warrior Sub-Zero (The Raid’s Joe Taslim) to kill Cole

He gets rescued by a Special Forces soldier named Jax (Mehcad Brooks), and meets another elite soldier named Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) who’s got one of those movie conspiracy walls full of plot exposition and Easter eggs from the Mortal Kombat games. Along with a foul-mouthed mercenary named Kano (Josh Lawson), they travel to the temple of an ancient god named Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), who introduces Cole to even more of Earth’s warriors (like Ludi Lin’s Liu Kang) and trains him to discover his “arcana” — a special ability that all Mortal Kombat warriors possess. (Think Sub-Zero’s balls of ice or Raiden’s lightning bolts.)

That sounds like a movie’s long first act, but in Mortal Kombat’s case, that’s basically the entire plot. The film never builds to any kind of formal confrontation. Every 15 minutes or so, the characters just beat each other up. Then, in the final act, everyone who’s survived that long beats up the other survivors. (In all cases, Choreographer Chan Griffin does an impressive job of blending the combatants’ — excuse me, kombatants’ — various fighting styles into cohesive, spirited battles.) Arcana get discovered, heads get squished, and there’s a really cool fight between Sub-Zero and his fellow ninja Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada). That’s it. Then the film just stops, after a shameless setup for the potential sequel.

Is that enough for a satisfying movie? If you’re a hardcore gamer, probably. McQuoid and screenwriters Dave Callaham and Greg Russo take the franchise’ mythos and characters incredibly seriously, faithfully recreating the fighters’ costumes, move sets, and Fatalities. (There’s even a clever joke about Mortal Kombat players’ cheap tactics.) Germain McMicking’s handsome cinematography elevates the material even further. This is surely the classiest a fight between a half-woman/half-dragon and a Shaolin monk with a razor-sharp hat could possibly look.

Casual MK fans will likely enjoy the fight sequences and overall production design, and remain a little flustered by some of the mechanics of the story. Characters randomly sprout new powers when the situation calls for them. Sometimes when someone dies, they’re just dead; other times they spontaneously combust, then return with new powers. Or they sprout new arms, or whatever they need to keep the plot moving forward. Tan’s Cole Young doesn’t bring anything to the table beyond generic my-family-needs-me motivations, and his Arcana pales in comparison to the franchise’s heavy hitters like Kung Lao.

Frankly, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game had a better sense of narrative momentum; at least there the fights progressed toward a final showdown with the big bosses. Without spoiling this Mortal Kombat, it mostly feels like a giant prologue to something else. Still, for sheer visual panache, intricate fight scenes, and the fact that it’s not an out-and-out embarrassment, Mortal Kombat rates very highly on the list of video game movies. On a more traditional scale, it’s more like a...

38. Alone in the Dark (2005)
Picking the worst video-game movie of all time is like picking the best slice of New York pizza: There is a lot of competition for the title, and everyone has their own preference. Personally, I give my vote to Alone in the Dark, the ultimate disasterpiece from the king of bad video-game movies, Uwe Boll. Tara Reid stars, typecast yet again as a brilliant archaeologist, opposite Christian Slater as a detective who investigates supernatural occurrences. I can’t tell you more than that because the film is actually incomprehensible, right down to the opening title crawl that’s so long and rambling it makes Alone in the Dark more confusing than it would have been without it. (The crawl is literally 90 seconds long.) The film’s initial writer, Blair Erickson, claims he wrote a more realistic detective story; Boll discarded it in order to add more action, special effects, and sex scenes. “The funny part is,” Erickson wrote in 2005, “after we walked off and he got his usual team of hacks to churn out a huge steaming pile of s±, he came back months later and asked us if he could get the rights to use scenes from our screenplay... for free. Oh, Uwe.”

36. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)
According to Wikipedia, the budget for this Mortal Kombat sequel was close to double the one for the original film. So why does it look like it absolute garbage? These effects wouldn’t pass muster in a Sega CD cutscene. It just goes to show money can’t fix everything — or anything in this disastrous sequel. The first Kombat wasn’t Chaucer, but at least it was watchable. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is so bad you’d swear it was made intentionally awful as part of some sort of elaborate The Producers-esque scheme to fleece investors out of their money.

36. House of the Dead (2003)
Uwe Boll’s reign of terror — and not like the good kind of spooky horror movie terror, I’m talking the bad kind of unwatchable video-game movie terror — started with this movie based on the first-person shooter of the same name that some people credit with introducing the concept of fast zombies years before Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.... That movie had already come out by the time Boll released his adaptation, meaning the novelty factor was already gone. In its place, you get some shoddy editing, a lot of violence, and some knockoff Matrix bullet time effects. Somehow, Boll parlayed this mess into an entire career making more schlock based on video games.

34. BloodRayne (2005)
Two years after House of the Dead, word still hadn’t gotten out about Boll and his factory of cinematic junk, because somehow (or $omehow) he convinced a ton of recognizable actors to appear in BloodRayne, a tacky vampire action flick. The cast includes Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Udo Kier, Meat Loaf, and Sir Ben Kingsley. They all look incredibly depressed about the whole thing. Can you blame them?

34. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)
15 years after the first Street Fighter the film got a sort-of reboot, which contains no legends and barely any street fighting. What it does have is Chris Klein, giving one of the all-time great bad performances as Charlie Nash, bearing no resemblance to the Street Fighter character of the same name, or really any human being who’s ever lived. Preening, mugging, squinting, snarling, it is truly a sight to behold.

33. Postal (2007)
By 2007, Uwe Boll’s career was such a joke that even he was making fun of it. In Postal he has a small role as himself, a terrible movie director and theme-park owner who gets shot in the crotch and then yells “I hate video games!” Hilarious! While more technically competent than Boll’s earlier films, Postal is even more repulsive, as it gleefully imagines a world where bad behavior justifies worse retaliation, as its hero (Zack Ward) avenges even the slightest injustice against him with outrageously violent vengeance. The clerk at the unemployment office was rude to him, so it’s okay for Dude to run her over with a truck. Again, hilarious!

32. Far Cry (2008)
In the right hands, this premise — a former Special Forces soldier (Til Schweiger) and a journalist (Emmanuelle Vaugier) get trapped on an island with a bunch of goons who work for an evil scientist — could make a totally solid B movie. Unfortunately, Far Cry was in the hands of one Uwe Boll. In addition to his usual blend of nonsensical editing and atrocious do-these-people-know-the-camera-is-on acting, this one contains a sex scene that’s shameless even by Boll standards, with star Schweiger’s Jack sliming his way into Vaugier’s Valerie’s pants by claiming hypothermia and suggesting they spoon to conserve body heat. If the sequence wasn’t brutal enough, the post-coitus scene the following morning begins with the immortal line “So how was I?”

31. Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
The second Silent Hill picks up the story of the kid from the original movie, now a teenager played by Adelaide Clemens. Her mom got trapped in an alternate dimension in the last movie, so now she hangs out with her dad (Sean Bean) — at least until he gets kidnapped. Then she hangs out with a classmate played by Kit Harrington because Game of Thrones was really hot when Revelation was made. Convoluted even by the standards of video-game movies, with monsters and multiple dimensions and crazy cults and seals of metatron, plus weaker effects than the previous effort. Do yourself a favor and stick to the first Silent Hill.

30. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is one of four films Uwe Boll made in 2007. (He may not be good, but the dude is fast.) This one’s got fantasy-adjacent shenanigans starring Jason Statham, Leelee Sobiesk