After many years of not being serviced a proper feature film, Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge has taken center stage as the frontline of the video game franchise that has been making a huge comeback in recent memory.

With a pretty standard screenplay by Jeremy Adams based on the basic origins of several familiar Mortal Kombat characters, the story takes place at the very beginning of the Scorpion character from the series. It doesn’t take long when tragedy strikes upon Hanzo Hasashi – his family slaughtered by the rival Lin Kuei clan – who later dubs himself as Scorpion after venturing into hell and back after a fierce confrontation with the murderous Sub-Zero.

The film is executed by director Ethan Spaulding, who worked on Avatar: The Last Airbender and a few DC movies before taking the helm of working on Scorpion’s Revenge.

For so long, Scorpion has been recognised as one of the more famous characters from the Mortal Kombat series. Equipped with a deadly spear, a hellish teleportation strike, and a skeletal figure beneath the yellow attire, it was fantastic to see great respect and ferocious audacity performed by Patrick Seitz to bring this character to life sincerely.

Alongside the array of characters that appear, the violence is probably another character to keep in mind while watching these heroes fight. Taking direct inspiration from the video games themselves, the martial arts aesthetic and brutal encounters can definitely mark this as a mature play to experience.

And it’s not just Seitz who greatly makes a human effort of bringing the titular character to life; it also has a fantastic cast who were rightly matched to their bloody counterparts. Jordan Rodrigues as Liu Kang, Jennifer Carpenter as Sonya Blade, and Joel McHale as Johnny Cage all make a great appearance into this animated fest. Overall, the voice acting is phenomenal and well-chosen. It was great to watch the stellar action scenes with the dedicated voice acting. Albeit personally, Joel McHale generates the ultimate Johnny Cage, and we were looking forward to each scene that included him due to the excellent writing and execution from writer Adams and actor McHale for their combined creative efforts.

While the voice acting, direction, and writing are pretty balanced, some of the animations seem slightly outdated. Some of the objects and strike transitions from the action scenes are a little screwy, but it’s not entirely distracting.