Tales Of The Underworld

Tis' a good day.

Tales Of The Underworld is I feel a story of two halves, one being a more light story that gives a bit of character depth for Ventress and the other being a pretty rock solid heavy drama story about the evolution of for my money the best bounty hunter in the galaxy Cad Bane. Although I will come out front and say the Ventress story really has two things to do with the seedy criminal underworld of Star Wars, jack and shit and jack left town. However an enjoyable and decent story it still was with her taking on a protector role for a young Jedi in hiding and trying to locate the Hidden Path, with fantastic chemistry and banter between her and young Lyco with plenty of lightsaber action to assuage nerds like me. Oh but Star Wars never change, it shows how long I've been doing this when we see a new Imperial Inquisitor and I'm calling that he's dead in two minutes and not even a name will be put to him until a book comes out, which spoilers I'm right again as always! But duuuuuuude WOW this Cad Bane story justifies the whole flip flapping series for my money, taking an evolutionary look from rapscallion youth, to henchmen young adult, to fastest gun this side of the Hydian Way mature badass. And this is a short story, keeping in the style of the Tales series where each arc is pretty much forty minutes without credits so you can knock this sucker out in the course of a meal, but how much emotion and dramatic storytelling they can squeeze in without it ever feeling forced or too densely packed is really damn impressive! It takes the western archetype of main character has someone close to him die by gunslinger who he swears revenge on, tweaks it just a notch, and it becomes a new and interesting story proving Star Wars will never get old. Vocal performances are still top notch, obviously all the love goes to Nika and Corey who have brought these fan favorite characters to life, but even the new talent like Lane Factor as this bit of a smart aleck Jedi or Artt Butler as Cad's oldest friend turned lawman with such short appearance runtimes craft something uniquely theirs. Do I even have to mention the animation? It's pretty clear we're only climbing higher and higher with the attention to detail, movement, and atmosphere with each subsequent series since technically Rebels before even last season of Clone Wars, and this is no exception. Of course I'm an easy sell on this universe, but I will admit I don't always need something groundbreaking as the next big project for Star Wars. I love the side stories, the brief snippets of character development, the connecting threads in this ever expanding tapestry, cause I just find it interesting and really cool. Even if some of the newer stuff doesn't grab your attention trust in me when I say there's been something you haven't experienced in the past almost 50 years of this franchise that will. Considering the grossly uneven (yet still good) caliber of the stories within, I'll give this 3.5 stars, 8.5/10! And truth be told, I honestly think Andor will be next cause new movie wise consider May a graveyard for reviews so we'll see how it goes.

Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge

I'm sort of split on this.

Now the concept of an R rated animated Mortal Kombat film is by no means a bad idea, I think the execution of it is performed very very well here. However, I'm more split on the plot elements. The story is sort of a hybrid of a Scorpion origin/standalone film mixed with the 1995 movie, and I genuinely wasn't expecting that. I fully anticipated a pure Scorpion movie, and while I don't need to fully know who Scorpion was before he was killed and returned as a specter I don't mind the story given with Hanzo and his family being killed and it's his quest for revenge that brought him back to life. That's cool, that could so easily be a film in and of itself, you get the backstory, you see him battle his way out of hell, craft his new persona, and seek vengeance on Sub-Zero. Beautiful, perfect! But then we just do the 95' movie again, with some variation of course, but I feel it was almost entirely unneccesary. Now if you wanted the original movie to have the ludicrous amounts of gore of the modern games then you are going to adore this movie. The blood is almost comical in it's absurd cartoony fashion, and the x-ray bits are clearly for the demographic who plays the new games, it's without a doubt the Mortal Kombat film for this generation. But every other aspect besides plot is really good, the animation is clean with a few good nods to anime thrown in, the voice cast is super good, music once more is decent, it really is just the nitty gritty details of the story that I'm not all for. Including one, I swear to God, it really made zero sense whatsoever and I feel was there just for the sake of a twist. It is beyond stupid, it almost makes me long for the plot points of Annihilation. Now granted those plot points were bullshit, but for the movie they were contained in it worked. Here, what the actual f*** were you on? I will say this however, in just one week I have garnered so much appreciation for Sonya than in 26 years of living, I'm serious once again she comes out as the best character for me. Which is odd because, not that I ever disliked Sonya, but my mains in the few games I played from most favorite was, Baraka, Reptile, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Noob Saibot if he was unlocked. I'm not even touching on Annihilation with how they handled Baraka. Look at how they massacred my boy. But we're in a happy place now, a gruesome, bloody, action packed, f***ed up happy place. So I would have to give this movie 3 stars, 7/10, not what I expected but neither was I disappointed. So I hope this week appeased my viewers and the elder gods, and tomorrow we wrap it all up with the new movie.