Jax (Mortal Kombat)

Jax's first game appearance came in Mortal Kombat II (1993), where he is on a mission to find his Special Forces partner, Lieutenant Sonya Blade, who had gone missing in Outworld while attempting to apprehend Kano. Though he succeeds in rescuing Sonya, Kano manages to evade capture.

When Outworld emperor Shao Kahn invades Earthrealm in Mortal Kombat 3 (1995), Jax is among the thunder god Raiden's chosen warriors to help save Earthrealm; preparing for battle by fitting his arms with metallic bionic implants. After helping foil Shao Kahn's attempt to permanently claim Earth as his own, Jax and Sonya found the Outer World Investigation Agency (OIA), which specializes in exploring and mapping other realms as well as the destruction of interdimensional portals that could lead to Earth.

Major Jackson "Jax" Briggs makes his first chronological appearance in the 2000 action-adventure game Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, in which he attempts to stop Kano and the Black Dragon crime organization from stealing an artifact capable of opening portals to other realms.

In Mortal Kombat 4 (1997), Jax and Sonya arrest Black Dragon member, Jarek, but they all end up joining forces with other Earthrealm heroes to stop fallen Elder God Shinnok and his Netherealm forces. After witnessing Jarek attack Sonya, Jax saves her and throws him over a cliff.[note 1] While returning to Earthrealm, Jax and Sonya find the malfunctioning Lin Kuei cyborg Cyrax stranded in a desert, and bring him back to the OIA headquarters, where they restore his humanity and recruit him as an agent of the Special Forces.

In Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002), Sonya and Jax have added the blind swordsman Kenshi into their ranks, but the OIA's underground facility is destroyed by Hsu Hao, who reveals himself to be part of the evil Red Dragon clan; bitter rivals of the Black Dragon. When Hsu Hao is later sent by Red Dragon leader Mavado to kill the sorcerer Shang Tsung, Jax intercepts and kills him. However, in the battle against the titular Deadly Alliance of Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, Jax and his allies are killed and resurrected by the Dragon King Onaga to become his slaves.

While Jax is not playable in Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004),[note 2] he plays a minor role in the storyline when Shao Kahn's enforcer Ermac and the spirit of Liu Kang break Onaga's mind control over Jax and his comrades. He returns in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (2006), in which Jax becomes playable again. Sonya sends Jax to lead a unit in search of survivors after destroying Sektor's Tekunin warship.

Jax is one of the eleven characters representing Mortal Kombat in the non-canonical 2008 crossover fighting game Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. In his ending, he underwent further mechanization to increase his power, though at the cost of his humanity.[13]

In the 2011 Mortal Kombat game, which is a reboot of the first three games, Jax is present at the start of the Shaolin Tournament and works with Sonya to bring down the Black Dragon. While they succeed in seizing many of their weapons caches, the Special Forces' key informant, Kano, is discovered to be a high-powered member of the organization, causing Jax and Sonya to focus on Kano's capture following the deaths of many of their comrades.[14][15] This leads them to the Mortal Kombat tournament on Shang Tsung's uncharted island, where Jax is captured and imprisoned, forcing Sonya to participate in the tournament to spare his life.[16] Raiden later enables Sonya to free a wounded Jax, but Shang Tsung destroys their extraction transport, stranding them on the island. Raiden reappears to heal Jax's injuries, which makes Sonya and Jax aware of both his presence and their crucial role in defending Earthrealm alongside Raiden's other chosen warriors.[17] After Liu Kang's victory over Shang Tsung, Sonya is held captive in Outworld before being rescued by Jax, who does not take part in the second tournament after his arms are psychically obliterated in a confrontation with Ermac and he is transported back to Earthrealm for medical attention.[18] Sonya and Jax, now with newly outfitted cybernetic arms, reunite with the other Earthrealm warriors to repel Shao Kahn's invasion of Earthrealm. While Raiden and Liu Kang commune with the Elder Gods, the Lin Kuei ninja clan and Shao Kahn's wife Sindel attack. While Sonya survives, Jax is killed and resurrected by Quan Chi in the Netherealm as one of his undead revenant slaves.[19]

Jax returns as a playable character in Mortal Kombat X. Two years after he was enslaved by Quan Chi, Raiden and Sonya manage to resurrect him. Due to his traumatic experience as a revenant, he retires from the Special Forces, marries a woman named Vera, and becomes a farmer. A further twenty years later, his adult daughter Jacqui followed in his footsteps and joined the Special Forces alongside Cassie Cage, the daughter of Sonya and Johnny Cage; albeit against her father's initial wishes, though he eventually came around to support her. Jax, Sareena, and Kenshi are assigned to capture Quan Chi in the Netherrealm to use him to revive their friends. He loses most of his men in the battle, but soon captures Quan Chi and transports him to Earthrealm.[20]

Jax returns in Mortal Kombat 11. Two years after the previous game, Jax has secluded himself on his farm following Vera's death and his honorable discharge from the Special Forces. After Kronika, the keeper of time, fractures the timeline in an attempt to start anew, a younger version of Jax gets brought to the present. She also recruits the present Jax to her side after promising him a new life in her new era,[21][22] which brings him into conflict with Jacqui and his younger self.[23] While leading an attack on Kronika's keep, Raiden encourages the present Jax to fight for Earthrealm once more after telling him Kronika is Shinnok's mother.[24][25] In the DLC story expansion Aftermath, a time-travelling Fujin helps bring the present Jax to his senses, leading to him abandoning Kronika's cause before the final battle.[26]

While Jax isn't playable in the base roster of Mortal Kombat 1, he does appear as an assist-based Kameo fighter. During the climax of the game's story, multiple timeline variants of Jax can be seen during the final battle.[27] In Kenshi's tower ending, Jax in Liu Kang's new timeline is revealed to be an FBI agent who helps Kenshi take down the Yakuza. After the battle, they are confronted by Shang Tsung. Following the incident, he learns from Kenshi as well as Johnny Cage's movies about the threats Outworld poses to Earthrealm and got his superiors to form the Outworld Investigation Agency and hire Kenshi as an agent.[28]

Michael Jai White as Jax in the 2011 first season of Mortal Kombat: Legacy. White first portrayed the character in the 2010 short film Mortal Kombat: Rebirth

As in the games, Jax often appears in alternate Mortal Kombat media as one of thunder god Raiden's warriors chosen to defend Earthrealm from Outworld forces. He is briefly seen in the 1995 film Mortal Kombat where he and Sonya are pursuing Kano. He was played by Gregory McKinney, while his name was misspelled as "Jaxx" in the closing credits.[29] Jax was among many characters recast for the 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat Annihilation, in which he was played by former American Gladiators actor Lynn "Red" Williams.[30] Mehcad Brooks played the character in the 2021 reboot film Mortal Kombat.[31]

Jax was a featured character in the 1996 animated series Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm, in which he was depicted as a cool-minded character who was regularly in an amiable mood. He was voiced by Dorian Harewood.[32]

In Kevin Tancharoen's 2010 short film Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, Michael Jai White played Jax as a police detective in the fictional location of Deacon City,[33] and reprised the role for the first two episodes of Tancharoen's 2011 Mortal Kombat: Legacy web series.[34] White said in a 2011 interview with MTV that he was originally to play Jax in the first Mortal Kombat film, but he turned it down in order to star in HBO's 1995 Mike Tyson biopic. He was again cast as Jax in Annihilation before ultimately dropping out upon being cast in the title role of Spawn.[35]

Ike Amadi voiced the character in the 2020 animated film Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge and the 2021 sequel Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms.[36][37]

Jax is a featured character in the 1994 Midway-produced Mortal Kombat II comic book that was written and illustrated by series co-creator John Tobias, which introduces the game's new characters and is used to set up the events leading to the second tournament.[38] He makes a single-panel appearance in the special-edition Mortal Kombat 4 comic packaged with the 1998 PC release of the game, contacting Sonya by radio as she pursues Black Dragon member Jarek.[39]

In Malibu Comics' Mortal Kombat comic series, Jax first appears in the September–November 1994 "Goro: Prince of Pain" three-issue miniseries, which featured MKII characters and tied into the 1994 "Blood & Thunder" six-issue story arc that covered the tournament from the first game. In the miniseries U.S. Special Forces, released in two parts in January and February 1995, he and Sonya work to capture an original Black Dragon character named Rojack.[40] Jax then featured in the six-part "Battlewave" miniseries that year, where he is brutally attacked by Goro and left in a coma, but awakens to fight off an assassination attempt and joins Cage on a mission in Outworld,[41] where the Earthrealm heroes succeed in breaking up a wedding between a brainwashed Sonya and Shao Kahn.[42]

An action figure of Jax was released by Toy Island in 1996 as part of their Mortal Kombat Trilogy line.[43] He and Reptile were featured in an "X-Ray" pack of two six-inch figures with transparent upper bodies that were based on the 2011 reboot and produced by Jazwares.[44] The company also released a four-inch Jax figure in 2012 that was packaged with an Uzi submachine gun (which was not in the game), but the figure was discontinued after only several months in release.[45]

Jax's noncanonical Mortal Kombat 11 ending, in which he manipulates time in order to end the Atlantic slave trade, drew online criticism from players for its perceived "woke" political agenda,[80][81] and resulted in the game being review bombed,[82] but it has received positive critical attention, being praised by Michael McWhertor of Polygon as "the best and boldest in the game".[83] Mike Fahey of Kotaku said, "There is no mention [therein] of 'black power.' There is no indication that ... developer Netherrealm Studios is promoting 'white genocide.'"[80] While Wes Fenlon of PC Gamer was also supportive in that the ending "tackles a heavy subject in its short running time", he considered it "unsurprisingly vague on the details."[84] The Mary Sue criticized the player backlash: "Why is this 'too woke'? Why is this threatening to people, when all it does is offer an alt-reality where we didn’t have 400 years of race-based chattel slavery?"[81] Patricio Kobek of TheGamer commented, "Jax’s ending has been blown so far out of context in a negative way that one would believe it to have been some explicit declaration of a political statement. Instead ... it is clear how ridiculous the outrage is."[82] In his 2022 book Mortal Kombat: Games of Death, author David Church wrote that the "outsize response to a common trope of alternate-history speculative fiction supports [a] caveat that racist attitudes brought into the game's reception by a subgroup of angry gamers may be a stronger force than in-game representations themselves."[85] Kyle A. Harris from Southern Illinois University Carbondale compared Jax with Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VII as they come across as "representations of black males tend to be uniform in the sense that they usually wear clothing that emphasizes their physical strength". In their case, both Jax and Barret are given cybernetic enhancements that further perpetuates and emphasizes their physical strength, "further contributing to their buck-ness".[86]

In a 2008 feature on the stereotyping of African-American characters in video games, The Escapist criticized the "ridiculous" attributes of black characters from "violent" fighting games such as Jax's "Machine Gun" special move (from Deadly Alliance and MK vs. DC Universe) and T.J. Combo's "Target Practice" finisher from Killer Instinct 2 in which he pulls out a gun and fatally shoots his opponent.[87] In 2021, Wired cited Mortal Kombat II's debut of Jax ("the all-American soldier"), along with the addition of Balrog in Street Fighter II, as "lead[ing] the mainstream charge in terms of casting a variety of genders and races" in video games.[88] Game Informer cited Jax among its "Respectful Representations Of Blackness In Gaming" in 2022, commenting that while he "suffers from a stereotypical 'big, angry black man' musculature ... most black fighters (like Balrog and Bruce Irvin) are shackled by their shady pasts and antagonistic tendencies, [but] Jax stands atop the heap as a captivating leader, loyal friend, and protective father."[89] However, in describing black characters in video games as "over-reliant on outdated, one-dimensional stereotypes", Laura Francis of GamesRadar+ remarked that Jax's "huge bulging biceps and loud demeanour are his primary defining traits."[90]