Also, Mortal Kombat (1995) is a good film.
> Many are "so bad it's good" such as
> anything Uwe Boll makes[...]
Another good example is the Phoenix Wright movie (in Japan). Both are excellent love letters to their fans.
For another example, see Final Fantasy: Advent Children which is a sequel to Final Fantasy 7. It's pretty enjoyable.
And to be fair, most films based on other media don't directly translate their source material either. Oh sure, novel based films do, but most comic book movies seem to have plots written specifically for the movie, with elements from various comic issues mixed in. And most based on TV series usually have new stories too.
Maybe it's best just to listen to the soundtrack instead.
The overt sexism (and threats) towards Sonya are pretty upsetting. I'd forgotten about that, and as a teenager I wrote it off as "well I guess he's just a Bad Guy". As an adult (and parent) now, I really feel like that kind of messaging is pretty toxic and unnecessary. (Heck, just the revenge motive of he-killed-her-partner would have been enough.)
There's a lot of writing that on some levels are Bad -- low-dimensional characters, etc -- but in the context of a movie character, wasn't all that bad. The characters were in many ways as much a caricature as their video game characters were. Johnny Cage is such a caricature of what one would imagine as the intersection of a spoiled (80s or 90s?) Movie Star with a martial artist -- in many ways, he seemed a direct spoof of Van Damme or other actors. And yet, I liked that they gave his character some redeeming qualities (IIRC).
As an action film, I still enjoyed the fight choreography for most of the fights, even if you have to have some huge suspension of disbelief about things like who would want to be one of Shang Tsung's disposable minions. :) I mean, what's the benefits and compensation package for that look like?
To this day the fight with Reptile is one of my favorite action sequences in any film I've seen.