The point is: Mortal Kombat as a movie - stupid idea? Or what? Well, yes and no. It is a stupid idea, and - as Street Fighter proved - disastrously poor entertainment if it's handled the wrong way. And the wrong way to handle a film of a video game is to try to make it work as a film. The right way to handle it, and the way Mortal Kombat handles it, is to make it a video game on celluloid. Thus, Mortal Kombat the movie has, in fact, even less of a plot than Mortal Kombat the game. What it does have (and don't worry, I'll be easing up on these italics pretty soon) is all the game's atmosphere, only better lit.

I'll explain. Mortal Kombat the movie is basically an excuse for lots of fights. What plot links there are are usually pretty shoddily constructed, and equally often there just aren't any - characters appear, then fight each other. The fights themselves, though, are pretty nifty - the characters identifiably use many of their arcade moves, fight in the arcade settings, and say the things they say in the arcade too. Everything moves at high speed, and the camera often pans back at a right angle so that the Kombatants are facing each other on an effectively 2D background - it actually does look and feel like watching the coin-op.

Whether that's a good thing or not is a moot point - after all, you can go and watch the coin-op for free. But the movie is (very slightly) better acted, and it makes for an entertaining enough hour-and-a-half or so if you go in unburdened by expectation.

There are oddities, though . It's a lot less gory than the game, for a start - even when people die by falling on to giant serrated spikes, there's no blood to be seen at all. But if the makers are aiming for a kiddie-friendly certification (yet to be decided at time of writing), then the spine-crushing sequence at the very beginning seems a bit out of place. I winced, and I'm 27. Some major characters are used very cursorily (Kano in particular is built up for half the film, then gets killed in a very offhand manner and disappears forever). And the 'funny' stuff (Christopher Lambert plays Rayden The Thunder God almost entirely as comic relief) doesn't go with the overall feel too well either.

Still, on the whole, Mortal Kombat is a lot better than it could have been, and it's got a nice ending. And recently, that's about as much as I've expected from any movie.

RATING: C+