(READ my previous article to get ready for whats in store)

SYNOPSIS: Special Agent Sonya Blade is hot on the heels of cartel leader Kano, who is getting ready to ship stolen robotics. When it become apparent that Blade was captured, Lt. Jax and Stryker lead a team to take down Kano and rescue Sonya.

REVIEW: MK:L  so far delivers on the promises of the short film. This is not your PG-13 rated Mortal Kombat.

The action is hard and the F-bomb is dropped like it’s nobody’s business(almost embarrassingly…we get it….you can say FUCK now.). Truth be told, in the first two episodes, the series has plenty of action and style. If your looking for great screenwriting…look somewhere else.

Both episodes scripts are mostly characters giving out very clunky exposition. One laughable moment had a tech guy explain the robot eye to Kano in detail, only to have Kano “I know that already!” It almost seemed like the tech guy almost wanted to say “But I had to explain that the audience sir!”

The series is also not very subtle. The aforementioned Kano scene is so blatantly pointing out how Kano will get his robot eye is a great example of it pushing the audience and saying “GET IT?!”

Hold it right here? Why? Whats so important I hold it right here?

Actual, as much as I bagged on the script, I will admit, that it doesn’t even seem to matter how underwhelming it is since each episode is really only 9-12 minutes long. If this was a feature film, this will be a major problem, but as short episodes online, it does the job just fine. We just came here to see fights and gore, just like the video game.

How are the fight scenes? Pretty good I might say. Director Kevin Tancharoen proves that he knows that he needs to have the shots nice and wide so that we can see the choreography. No “Bad-Bourne-Shaky-Cam” shooting here. I could nitpick that the hits don’t seem like they have that much of an impact, it’s still some solid fight scenes, especially since both Michael Jai White(Jax) and Darren Shahlavi(Kano) are talented on screen fighters.

The one thing I could say about Tancharoen’s directing is that he might be trying to hard to make the series LOOK cool. Some times he overdoes it with the slow-mo shots and one or two over-stylized shots, but at the same time for a series as overindulgent as Mortal Kombat, it does seem fitting.

Surprisingly, outside one VERY sweet gore shot (if you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil it…but I mean, come on, why didn’t you watch it yet? IT’S RIGHT ABOVE HERE IN THIS REVIEW!) the blood letting is pretty simple and spare. I was expecting a lot more, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see if future episodes will bring on the blood.

It is interesting to note that they decided to start off with the most simple regular Earth stuff. Probably to just warm us up,but I will admit that it doesn’t feel like Mortal Kombat quiet yet. Right now it feels like an action film (or a direct to DVD action film). I’m wondering how they’re going to handle the Outworld stuff, especially since the budget is pretty small (though really BIG by webseries standards).

So far, it’s pretty entertaining for what it is. As a nice short internet distraction, it ain’t bad. You could do worse, and if your a Mortal Kombat fan, this might be the thing you’ve been waiting for since playing the game all those many years ago. We have 7 more episodes to go, and I’m curious to see what they got next. It ain’t ground breaking…but hey, at least it’s better then Street Fighter: The Legend of Chung Li….so there IS that.

Come back next week when I review Episode 3! Until then, check out the trailer to the WHOLE series below….