Mortal Kombat II kills a lot of characters. Not content with killing off the obviously disposable mooks and side characters you’d usually expect, Simon McQuoid’s sequel goes for the jugular with reckless abandon, killing main characters, huge villains, and genuinely more heroes than you’d ever predict. In total, Mortal Kombat II kills 9 characters (technically one counts twice, but no spoilers on that here), brings 3 back from the dead (though only one of the 9 who die, actually), and very nearly kills a god. As Sonya Blade snarkily says to Johnny Cage earlier on, it’s called “Mortal” Kombat. We should have expected it.
As the movie’s writer Jeremy Slater exclusively told us ahead of MK II‘s release, death in this universe doesn’t work the same way it usually does. He chose to bring back both Kano (Josh Lawson), and Kung Lao (Max Huang) because he wanted to – he felt Kano was the best thing about the first movie, and Kung Lao’s razor hat was too cool to pass up. The movie explains those resurrections by introducing necromancer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman), and bringing zombie-like Revenants into the movie series’ lore, so theoretically anyone could be brought back when they die. We already know that Mortal Kombat 3 will deal with the surviving heroes going to the Netherrealm to save their lost comrades, but there’s a catch, and it might mean one hero gets left behind.
Why Cole Young Probably Won’t Be Back in Mortal Kombat II (Unless a Rule Changes)
It’s hinted quite early in Mortal Kombat II that the condition of the corpse impacts the state of return when Kano is resurrected without his eye. Quan Chi’s dark magic, after all, requires the retrieval of the victim’s corpse, and seemingly cannot restore what’s missing. That’s later confirmed more concretely by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), who threatens Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) with crushing her mother’s skull making another resurrection impossible. That surely spells bad news for Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, who earned the accolade of the worst hero death in the sequel.
After the original character proved divisive after the first movie, Young’s role in the sequel is notably diminished, as he gets only a handful of lines before his fateful bout with Shao Kahn. In the iconic Deadpool stage, Young puts up a good fight, but is killed by the now-immortal Kahn with a hammer blow that annihilates his opponent’s entire head. There is clearly nothing left but a grease stain, and then to add insult to injury, Kahn drags his headless corpse into the acid lake next to their fighting platform. In other words, Quan Chi couldn’t possibly resurrect his corpse, because there isn’t one.
There is, of course, the chance that Slater – who is returning to write the threequel – could write Cole Young into the Netherrealm as complete once more. When Johnny Cage and Kano enter the realm of the dead in MK II to find Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), he looks exactly as he did when he was alive, and Mortal Kombat 3 will apparently see the heroes head back into the realm to find their lost friends, so the corpse condition rule could be written around. And as Slater told us, “It’s my job to figure out how do we get some of them back in, but maybe how do we get them back in, in ways that the audience is not necessarily expecting. How do we use those deaths as a jumping-off point to tell interesting stories for some of these characters or to take them on new journeys.” In other words, he has the power to do what he wants. The question, more pertinently, of course, is whether fans want Cole Young back.
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