Review: Monster Hunter
Tuesday, December 22, 2020 at 8:00PM
by Tony Ruggio
2020 has been a prolific year for monster movies, be they funny and romantic (Love & Monsters), purely for kids (A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting), or in the case of Monster Hunter, mindless action. Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil) returns to the other genre that made him, the genre he never really left: video game adaptations. He and wife Milla Jovovich are the king and queen of them, if there can be such a thing for the seemingly accursed genre.
Folks, including myself, keep saying they’re the next big thing in Hollywood after superhero movies, and while valiant attempts have been made, even when talented people are aboard (Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia, Justin Kurzel and Fassy/Cotillard in Assassin’s Creed), they don't pan out. Like all the rest, Monster Hunter ain’t exactly the ticket to Hollywood genre royalty...
After a desert storm ransacks their outfit, a group of Army rangers are plunged into another dimension, one populated with its own denizens and, more importantly, gargantuan monsters with a taste for human flesh. Jovovich is the outfit’s captain, and she dutifully fills a pair of shoes that are quite familiar to us and to her as an actress: the badass heroine with a vague backstory. We know nothing about her outside of a wedding ring she carries with her and a desire to get home, so this is bare-bones character work we’re talking about here, even by action movie standards. She eventually meets a local warrior (Tony Jaa) who knows the land and the large predators after them: a giant bull that burrows through sand like a worm outta Tremors and looks like the living embodiment of El Diablo (they call it Diablos), plus a nest of car-sized spiders that come out at night.
The first hour and change is spent following them as they struggle to fend off arachnids and get past Diablos who covets the dunes surrounding their rockbed, makeshift home. So much time is spent on it that you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie might be over once they succeed in killing them. However, there’s another thirty minutes left of deus ex machina foes with throaty voices and crazy wigs (Ron Perlman), as well as dragons to boot. Story-telling wise, it’s never a good idea to introduce a new, bigger monster heretofore not mentioned at all or even implied.
Milla and Mysterious Warrior bond over enemy blood spilt, the pair becoming tentative buddies in monster hunting while a pretty cool electronic score booms over them, often evoking the Nintendo tunes of old. They’re a good pair, so it’s mildly enjoyable watching them tag-team such beastly enemies. That being said, they’re not miracle workers. The movie drags in spite of the onslaught of creature feature action or the relatively short runtime, and that’s coming from a guy who doesn’t mind long runtimes. The truly arresting images are all-too-brief amid the visual chaos, and the characters all-too-thin to matter. What Monster Hunter lacks in feelings it could’ve made up for in atmosphere, but there’s not much of the latter either. The industry will just have to keep looking for a film that can break this genre out its vapid shell. D+
Monster Hunster is currently in theaters
Reader Comments (8)
We know nothing about her outside of a wedding ring she carries with her and a desire to get home, so this is bare-bones character work we’re talking about here, even by action movie standards.
This is the sort of Saturday matinee nonsense that needs a BIG SCREEN and plenty of pop corn to work
Paul W.S. Anderson. I have no idea why 1. He still has fans and 2. Critics are still giving him a soft pass in 2020. You KNOW, at this point, that he's "The Action Director that makes Michael Bay, even now, look like Classic James Cameron." And that does hurt a bit to even SAY, because I saw as much of 6 Underground as I could stand.
I think it's Paul W.S. Anderson, unlike Michael Bay, doesn't take himself too seriously and he has a sense of humor. Bay on the other hand is a misogynistic cunt who doesn't know how to keep the camera still for more than 4 seconds and doesn't know how to shoot for anything over 5 seconds.
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