Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa in Monster Hunter
According to Facebook’s “memories” feature, today is the fourth anniversary of the press screening for Michael Fassbender’s Assassin’s Creed. The big-budget ($125 million) and seemingly prestigious adaptation of the video game franchise was positioned as finally giving video game movies their proverbial Batman Begins. Alas, the awkward, choppy and unintentionally funny po-faced melodrama continued the unofficial curse of the video game movie, one which Warcraft (despite grossing a record-high $438 million) failed to break. Ironically, the next handful of video game movies released between March of 2018 (Tomb Raider) and February 2020 (Sonic the Hedgehog) were to at least varying degrees, “good.” Alas, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter breaks that five-movie, two-year winning streak. It’s not an abomination, but it’s also not very good.
Based on Capcom’s video game actioner and produced by Constantin Films, Tencent Pictures and Toho (among others), this Screen Gems/Sony release found itself in an unexpected pickle two weeks ago when an offhand line of dialogue by a character played by Jin Au-Yeung caused an outcry among Chinese audiences over alleged racial implications, leading the film to be pulled from China during its opening weekend. That line (an unintentional reference to an infamously racist playground chant) no longer exists, nor did it pop up in the screener copy afforded to domestic critics. But the damage was done, as the only reason Tencent and Sony released the film this month (instead of pushing it back to 2021) was to take advantage of a mostly-recovered Chinese moviegoing marketplace.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, also starring Milla Jovovich, earned a shocking $159 million in China alone back in early 2017, making up 51% of its $312 million (on a $40 million budget) global cume. Among English-language, Hollywood flicks, the film’s 91/9 overseas/domestic split is a record. Even if Monster Hunter wasn’t going to pull Resident Evil 6 numbers, the potential for a “good enough” release in China was reason enough to keep the $60 million action fantasy on the 2020 release calendar. Whether or not the outrage was justified (I’m firmly of the opinion that folks in a given demographic should be allowed to make jokes about their respective demographic), Monster Hunter is opening in North American theaters this Friday.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest video game-based fantasy at least starts on the right foot. It opens with a gloriously goofy prologue featuring a scenery-chewing Ron Perlman, noted “kill you six times before you hit the ground” butt-kicker Tony Jaa and a knife-wielding cat aboard a doomed pirate ship overrun by giant sandworms. This is precisely the kind of imagery and content you want in a movie called Monster Hunter. Still, the excitement dims as the present-tense story quickly turns into a generic tale of generic soldiers who eventually get pulled into an alternate fantasy world populated by gigantic monsters. Cue an entire act of overqualified actors (Diego Boneta, Clifford T.I. Harris Jr. and Meagan Good among them) shooting at giant beasts that generally can’t be killed by mere machine gunfire.
Things improve slightly in the second act, after (spoiler alert, I suppose) most of the supporting cast is wiped out. The title monster hunter, in this case a miraculously surviving Tony Jaa, rescues Jovovich’s Artemis. Neither character makes much effort to speak each other’s language, which makes for an oddly honest partnership as they eventually encounter (more vague spoilers) additional allies and more giant monsters. None of this is meant to be taken seriously, and there is only enough cryptic worldbuilding to tease a follow-up. I haven’t played the game, so I can’t say whether the film is indeed another “prologue for the sequel which adapts the game.” Considering Anderson’s last such non-sequel video game flick spawned a six-movie, $1.23 billion-grossing franchise, I can’t fault his optimism.
The 105-minute PG-13 feature climaxes with a “final boss” battle which is one of those “Where the hell was this for the rest of the movie?” sequences. Think of the final taxi chase in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla. The film’s big-screen “splendor” is lessened on a digital screener, although you could say the same for folks who, even in regular times, might have waited to see this film on VOD or DVD. Oddly enough, this had one of the sharper audio mixes I’ve yet heard from an online screener in this hell year. Monster Hunter is a more conventional video game actioner compared to the downright auteristic Resident Evil: Afterlife and Resident Evil: Retribution. However, it’s a better film (by default) than Anderson’s series finale. Maybe the sequel was supposed to be more off-the-wall?
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter isn’t aggressively bad so much as it’s aggressively unremarkable. Coming from a guy with a knack for crafting unapologetic B movies (Mortal Kombat, Pompei, The Three Musketeers, etc.) that often have the bonkers-bananas verve of bigger “A” movies (Event Horizon is a modern classic), that’s disappointing. Yes, it’s another “bad video game movie.” Still, it comes on the heels of Tomb Raider (decent), Rampage (excellent), Detective Pikachu (delightful), Angry Birds Movie 2 (much better than its predecessor) and Sonic the Hedgehog (a solid kid-friendly romp). I wasn’t crazy about The Final Chapter back in 2017, so we’ll see if this mini-wave of good video game movies is book-ended by two disappointing Anderson efforts or whether this is merely a bump along the road. Your move, Uncharted.
