Main cast: Milla Jovovich (Natalie Artemis), Tony Jaa (The Hunter), Ron Perlman (The Admiral), Tip “T.I.” Harris (Lincoln), Diego Boneta (Marshall), Meagan Good (Dash), Josh Helman (Steeler), Jin Au-Yeung (Axe), Hirona Yamazaki (Handler), Jannik Schümann (Aiden), Nanda Costa (Lea), and Nic Rasenti (Captain Roark)
Director: Paul WS Anderson
I’m not familiar with the Monster Hunter games, mostly because for a long time, those games weren’t released outside of Japan. Sure, I can always import those games at a steep price, but I don’t know how to read Japanese, so it won’t be very fun trying to play those games. All I know is that, in those games, the player kills big monsters, use materials scavenged from the corpses to make awesome weapons and armors, kill bigger monsters, loot their corpses to make better weapons and armors, repeat and rinse. That’s the kind of game I’d love to play, honestly, especially if I could fashion for my character the cool threads Tony Jaa’s character is sporting in this movie.
Oh, alright, I love big monster movies. The bigger, the better. Hence, Monster Hunter should be a movie after my heart, because it’s all about big bad monsters and pint-sized folks hunting one another. Of course, with this a movie scripted and directed by Paul WS Anderson, naturally his wife Milla Jovovich gets to be a brand new character that shows up to steal all the thunder from established characters in the video game setting. Sounds familiar?
Ms Jovovich is Captain Natalie Artemis, who leads a team of UN security team in pursuit of some missing soldiers in desert. They drive into a huge sandstorm because they are all smart and sensible like that, and without realizing it, emerge into an entirely different world. The desert they are in are now made up of white sands, and they locate the soldiers they are searching for. Those soldiers are charred corpses, their vehicles wrecked, and most perplexingly, the sands around the corpses have been turned into glass. Even more bizarre is how there are no tracks or anything that would suggest that these soldiers were attacked in any way.
Well, they soon find out how those soldiers died when a huge monster, whose name will later be revealed as Diablos, emerge from beneath the dunes to pursue them. Not all survive, naturally, and the remaining soldiers seek shelter in some caves only to realize that those caves are full of giant spiders. Fortunately, Artemis is protected by the most powerful plot armor ever, so she survives while everyone else in her team dies. She is now alone against the monsters, although she will find allies along the way, naturally.
The good news is, the monsters here resemble their video game counterparts pretty faithfully. so at least this movie isn’t a complete deviation from the video game. However, the CGI can be a bit of a touch and go, with the monsters looking good at some angles only to look very fake and plastic-like at other angles. Some scenes, like Nerscylla eggs sticking to their victims and spiders later bursting out of them, are too obviously fake to be even a little frightening. Indeed, the best way to view this movie is to treat it as an action flick rather than a monster film, because there are some pretty cool fight scenes here.
As much as she gets flak for playing Mary Sue characters that hijack the canon of a video game series, Ms Jovovich is actually a solid action star, and I always say we can never have too many female action stars. She may be the most emotive actress around, but Artemis isn’t a character that demands much range, just plenty of kick-ass posturing, and that is what Ms Jovovich does very well here. Tony Jaa is good too, in the sense that he too may not be the best actor around, but have him jumping and beating up things, and baby, he’s in his element. Ron Perlman is of course playing himself as usual, but he’s entertaining here rather than over the top annoying, so I’m perfectly fine with that.
This movie… well, it has a paper-thin script, but come on, it is what it is. Monsters versus small things, small things make big explosions and shoots fiery things and do flying kicks, and everything gets blown up and carved up. That’s what it is, that’s what it sets out to do, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly alright. I also like how the movie basically lampoons clichés related to soldiers in a movie out of a mission within its first act—that’s right, the characters that aren’t Artemis cheerfully telegraph how they will die by doing everything they can to wave family pics, talk about how they will let others identify their bodies once they are dead, and more. These and other ways in which the movie lets me know that it is not taking itself too seriously makes it more watchable than it otherwise would be.
If the CGI had been a little bit less fake in areas, really. Still, this is a nice palate cleanser until the next Godzilla movie comes along.
