Karl Urban Gets Uncaged in Mortal Kombat II

Karl Urban has been confirmed to be playing Mortal Kombat’s macho mullet-wearing martial arts movie star Johnny Cage. The actor gives another display of his own signature brand of sweat-and-grit swagger in the second trailer for Mortal Kombat II, this time in a more “meta” performance of one of the franchise’s most popular fan-favorite characters. It’s a big swing for the series, and even a bigger step forward on Warner Bros.’s longshot attempt at reviving the cult video game series as a successful live-action film franchise.

Urban, who is known for playing mercenary and faux-sociopath Billy Butcher on Amazon series The Boys, will surely be a major draw for fans of his action-heavy and genre-blending work (Star Trek, Dredd, Jane Doe), but he also has the exact sort of physicality and star-power needed to pull off playing a character that gets a lot of knowingly wacky lines but still requires them to be given weight and energy (loads of both).

(Urban previously also had a non-speaking cameo role in the 2021 reboot, which was the first film appearance of Cage’s eventual protégé Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan.)

But this new take on Johnny Cage is going to be a bit different from the character fans have read about and seen in comics and games for decades now. Sure, he’s still good at punching and taking punches, and Urban does plenty of swaggering around in his embodiment of the character in the new trailer.

But if Cage is known from the games as a cocky, cool peak-career action star, Urban’s take on the character in Mortal Kombat II is more self-aware — and also “washed-up” — than that. The more streetwise character is very much in keeping with the increasingly-meta bent of this current incarnation of the series.

The new trailer follows in the footsteps of a fake teaser trailer for Uncaged Fury, the in-universe Johnny Cage movie from the 1990s which Warner Bros. released as a faux trailer in its own right yesterday. That VHS-quality promo plays hard on Cage’s in-universe filmography, with plenty of silly action set pieces and improbably-violent martial arts moves. End credits for that in-character movie mention other Cage films like Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage, and it’s a good bet that the actual Mortal Kombat II will mine the meta-stance of its real-life predecessor as heavily, if not more so.

In addition to being a sequel to the reboot film of the same name from 2021, Mortal Kombat II is also a direct sequel to 1995’s Mortal Kombat, which first introduced Shang Tsung (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), Raiden, Sonya Blade, and finished with the big surprise reveal that the next character getting a film of their own will be Johnny Cage (who, interestingly, had not yet been seen or introduced at all in the live-action film series).

The first reboot film was directed by Simon McQuoid, and it was a decent-reviewed, moderately-well-performing movie that got a follow-up greenlit at Warner Bros. not just because the same director will be back but because of the casting of Mortal Kombat’s most-popular character, Sub-Zero, who, this time around, will be played by Joe Taslim. (Also returning from the previous movie are Lewis Tan as Cole Young, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Mehcad Brooks as Jackson, and Jessica McNamee as Jax.)

Now that the actor for Johnny Cage is finally locked, Mortal Kombat II will be the fourth-ever live-action Mortal Kombat film, and the first since the original one from 1995, which will hit 30 years old this year.

The original live-action Mortal Kombat was a well-reviewed movie that came-and-went on VHS without much fanfare, but has since achieved a reputation as a campy cult classic (a word which we’d see again used by some of the trailer text of both trailers). Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s now-iconic portrayal of Shang Tsung in that movie is testament to how beloved that first Mortal Kombat is, even today.

The direct follow-up to the first Mortal Kombat, the 1997 Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was neither well-liked nor a hit at the box office, after which the series seemingly vanished from theaters, with its publisher, Midway, soon filing for bankruptcy. Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the series in 2020, and the path to this current Mortal Kombat reboot film has been a long one indeed.

“The mortal battle for Earthrealm’s survival is about to get a lot more personal,” says the official synopsis of Mortal Kombat II. “The champions of Earthrealm are forced to come together – with the help of none other than Johnny Cage – to prevent Outworld’s evil Emperor Shao Kahn from completing his conquest of Earth in this ultraviolent sequel.” The movie, just as the first one, will feature the franchise’s R-rated blood and gore, fantastical stakes, and brutally realistic martial arts.

Fans can rest easy in the knowledge that Mortal Kombat II is surely going to hew closer to the DNA of the games that made the Mortal Kombat series such a special thing to so many fans than the previous reboot did, based on the casting of one of its most-beloved characters as its headlining star.

The sequel has no official release date yet, but is in active production.