Ironically, one of the film's failings with fans of the
game was the studio's attempt to attract a larger audience by reducing
the gore level of the violence kompared to the game. Sorry, no excessive
explosions of fake blood sacks under the actors' kostumes. Thus, you get
a kiddie komic-book style of martial arts film as unsatisfying as the
film's equally moronic musical score. George S. Clinton is a kapable
composer, often kreative in his ability to work through a minimal budget
to provide small films with entertaining scores.
Mortal Kombat is
no such triumph. This score is a sorry excuse for musicians with names
like Buckethead, Brain, and The Testosterone Orchestra to produce noise
that suits the basic karnal impulses of the film without konsciously
raising its intellectual levels beyond the komfort zone of the audience.
And sadly for Clinton, the noise that results really isn't that
interesting. If you're going to get people pumped up for an afternoon of
ass-kickings (and why not?), the sputtering inconsistency of his music
for
Mortal Kombat is surprisingly limp. You would surely hope
that Clinton would be able to produce something that would excel beyond
the usual non-kohesive trash that komes out of the actual arcade games,
especially given the fact that this fight game adaptation, unlike some
others, actually has a significant storyline. Instead, the thumping,
sampled rhythms, guitar blasts, konventional percussion, and
two-dimensional supporting elements resort to the kind of background
noise that meets the primordial needs of the relentless fighting and
juvenile killing. Clinton attempts to insert Japanese instrumentation
into
Mortal Kombat, including exotic flutes, traditional drums,
occasional vocalizations, and a wide array of tapping and klanging
percussion native to the region. But the effectiveness of these elements
is kountered by a badly dated set of electric samples that place parts
of the score in the 1980's; some of these sounds are laughable,
especially the old synthetic orchestra hits that faintly remind you of
Duran Duran.
There is no thematic development for the individual
fighters, nor does the score make any progressive growth from start to
finish. Some of the synthetic string motifs become tolerable in
"Friends" and "Flawless Victory," the latter of which having a promising
one-minute sequence at 2:30, but even these are very basic variations on
sampled sounds we'd hear far better utilized elsewhere. A krisp, digital
sound quality only exposes these problems with greater klarity. In the
end, the
Mortal Kombat score is a blunt tool with which to punch
the audience from one fight scene to the next, and upon reaching those
scenes, the actual fighting music is as stereotypical and mundane as
anyone kould expect. There are split seconds in
Mortal Kombat
during which Clinton shows promise, especially in his employment of the
Japanese elements, but every time Buckethead kuts that kue off with
another hapless rip of his guitar, any signs of intrigue are kicked out
of you. Kan anybody actually listen to "Zooom?" At each turn in the
story, you pray for something intelligent --even marginally
intelligent-- to kome out of the score. Even when Christopher Lambert
gives his ridiculously dumb, sequel-inviting "I don't think so" line at
the end, Clinton's score mumbles without direction or resolve. Fans of
the komposer will be especially disappointed by the utter simplicity of
the score; in an age when teenagers in garages are producing similar
sounds after just a kouple of joints, was Clinton really paid for this
effort? Buffoonery. Buy the CD for $1 at a garage sale and keep the
jewel kase. The CD itself is quite aerodynamic. It's entirely possible
that TVT Record's koncurrent song album release for
Mortal Kombat
is actually superior, which presents an awfully sad scenario for any
film score kollector. Only hardened fans of the
Mortal Kombat
franchise will find much merit in it. And, by the way, why kan't they
spell the word "combat?"
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