The road to Mortal Kombat 2 has been a long one, but if you’re waiting for it to be a dialed-up, more violent version of the 2021 original, it sounds like it’ll be worth the wait. Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat scored points for its faithfulness to the spirit and characters of the games, but used Lewis Tan’s Cole as an audience surrogate to explore the lore accessibly. Now that stage-setting is done, Tan says it’s time for the tournament to “set up all the different fights everybody wanted to see.”
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To promote his new action movie, Wildcat, Tan spoke to ComicBook.com exclusively and revealed more of what we can expect from the upcoming sequel. Excitingly, Tan says we should expect a more extreme version of the now-4-year-old actioner. When we asked how the sequel earned its R-rating and how it compares to the original, Tan said:
“I think it’s worse. Some of the fatalities and some of the fights are worse. But they are way more detailed and way more complex, which is what I wanted… to step up the level of complexity and depth in the fights. It’s Mortal friggin Kombat. We should have the best fight movie of the year. That has to be the goal. I think we accomplished that.”
Tan Hypes His own Secret Mortal Kombat 2 Battle (& Reveals What it Cost)
Sadly, there seemingly won’t be a rematch in Mortal Kombat 2 between Cole and Sub-Zero (which Tan wanted because he and Johannes Taslim are such good friends). But he promises that he does “have one of the most epic fights in the second movie, for sure. The location of the fight and who Cole gets to fight was pretty special.”
Tan also reveals that the specific fight – which he won’t be drawn on details for – is going to be “a fan-favorite moment.” He also says it was a heavy shoot:
“If I tell you what happened to me, people are going to figure out who I fought. I will say that, yeah, I had a bunch of bruises. I was pretty banged up on this one for reasons that will soon be discovered. I love this stuff. I love to get into the performance as much as I can and do all the fights that I can. I think in the second movie, there was only one big stunt that I didn’t do because it was pretty gnarly. My character does a double backflip and lands on the floor. Stuff like that is a little too dangerous for me to be doing. You are bound to take a couple of hits and bangs when you do fights, but it’s worth it.”
That sounds particularly promising, and Tan is very clear that the reins are off for the sequel:
“They really let the action team go crazy in the second one. Whereas in the first one, they were trying to balance the storyline with the fights. In the second one, it’s the tournament. We were already in. We are already sold. The tournament is there. It’s happening, and now we can set up all the different fights everybody wanted to see. And they really gave the action team free rein to run with it, shoot it, and the way it was edited. When you do that, and you have a good team, and you trust them, you get gold. It’s not that they didn’t do that in the first movie, but I think they were just trying to balance too many things, and we learned from those moments.”
Bring it on. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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