'Monster Hunter' Review: Avant Schlock

Monster Hunter is a movie based on a Japanese video game series of the same name, involving people who hunt, and are hunted, by monsters. It stars Milla Jovovich and was written, directed, and produced by Paul W. S. Anderson, Jovovich's husband. Anderson has been directing video game movies for nearly thirty years, including Mortal Kombat and four of the six Resident Evil movies. This is his and Jovovich's fifth film together.

We begin with a pirate ship sailing in the sand. A big monster chases the ship. On the boat are real humans dressed as anime characters, including Ron Perlman in one of the greatest blonde wigs ever committed to film. There is a voiceover about how this is another world, which is helpful in case the giant sand monster and sand ships don't give it away.

We cut to our world. Army Captain Natalie Artemis (Milla Jovovich) and her squad are looking for missing soldiers in the desert and encounter a vicious lightning storm that transports them to another world, which is also mostly desert but full of giant spiders. Lots of her squad members die and Artemis meets Hunter (Tony Jaa), who speaks an unearthly foreign language, thereby ensuring neither actor has to memorize too many lines of dialogue and dubbing for worldwide distribution isn't too costly. Artemis wants to get back home through a portal on the other side of the desert, but a fearsome dragon-like creature called Diablos guards the path.

Did you know "Diabolos" is Greek for "Devil?" It's true!

Any crumbs of a story in the beginning, such as Artemis having a fiancé, are never mentioned again. At first I imagined that, one day late into the shooting schedule, Anderson realized he forgot to write certain scenes, then quickly reminded himself he's filming a movie called Monster Hunter and went about his day. However, the more I think about it - and, in the last few days, I've thought about Monster Hunter more than I'd like to admit- the more I suspect something else is going on.

Monster Hunter is so pure in its intent as a monster-fighting action movie it's almost experimental, an avant-garde accident. Other action movies compromise the action by including a dramatic emotional arc, for instance. No, says Monster Hunter, that would make our movie a DRAMA, and we are an action movie. Other action movies would have lots of wisecracks or a romance. No, proclaims Monster Hunter, this isn't a COMEDY or ROMANCE but an ACTION.

In a recent interview with Vulture, Anderson said, "The movies I gravitated toward [when I was younger] tended to be movies that were very visual and sparse on dialogue," before going on to list The Driver by Walter Hill and the works of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville- the spiritual godfather of the New Wave movement- as influences. Monster Hunter, he explained straight faced, was inspired by the 1968 John Boorman film Hell in the Pacific, about two WWII servicemen (one American, one Japanese) stuck on a small island and featuring very little dialogue.

From his earliest films, Anderson has always explored space and how its characters interact inside that space. For him, movies are stories of movement, of sound and vision. They are meant to show things that cannot be communicated in a different storytelling medium, like theatre. This makes him the perfect director for video game movies. After all, a video game's quality usually hinges on one fundamental question, one beyond art design, story, or scope: Is the character you're controlling moving through a space in a way that is enjoyable?

"It's like watching gameplay," whispered a woman in the theater. She wasn't wrong.

Monster Hunter was filmed in the Namib Desert in Namibia, replete with giant rock structures. The film features great cinematography, editing and sound. The game series is a bright, colorful anime universe populated with jungles and fantastical creatures. Monster Hunter as a movie is a surreal desert piece that, if one squints at the screen, calls back to Lawrence of Arabia or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mixed with the gut-punching adrenaline of Starship Troopers. Only during the third act (spoilers) do we encounter something completely different.

Jovovich carries the picture. There are those thespians who sometimes make action movies, and then there are action stars. Jovovich is of the latter, and one of the very best, up there with Van Damme, Chan, Schwarzenegger, and Reeves. Actor Jaa, a Muay Thai martial artist and former monk, commits himself to a few remarkable stunts and fight scenes. Ron Perlman's performance as Admiral is hilarious. It's quite possible he endured being in this movie by repeating three words to himself during filming, over and over, like a self-help mantra: "new swimming pool, new swimming pool, new swimming pool."

It means NEW SWIMMING POOL

I laughed very hard and jumped in my seat a few times during Monster Hunter. It is not a good movie by any traditional metric of film criticism, but it is a good movie for the moment we inhabit. As we all walked out of the theatre with the credits blaring, someone said, "You know, for two hours, I didn't think about COVID, or politics, or anything, really. Nothing reminded me of the real world. It was so, so nice." That remark, I think, is at the heart of the movie's appeal. As modern blockbusters clumsily attempt to touch on serious hot-button issues that affect our real lives, Monster Hunter stands alone. It's dumb, silly, and free of serious concerns.

So nice indeed.