Tony Jaa

(Amazon Streaming, October 2021) As someone who has played a lot of videogames, I always twitch when movie reviewers use “feels like watching someone else play a video game” as a slam against bad movies. But sometimes they do have a point, and it takes a surprisingly short time for Monster Hunter to become, well, about as boring as watching someone else play a video game. This is not helped in the slightest by a narrative structure that has the heroine (Milla Jovovich, in a familiar role) battling one type of monster after another in relative silence with a non-speaking NPC supporting character (Tony Jaa, good yet unremarkable) before a very thin amount of plot right before the final boss battle. Not having played the Monster Hunter video game series, I won’t have too much to say about the adaptation—but I remain impressed (not in a good way) at how the film manages to suck a lot of energy out of a dragon-versus-Ospreys battle. Writer-director Paul W. S. Anderson is now an old hand at that exact kind of film (i.e.: action-driven videogame adaptations featuring his wife Jovovich) and it’s troubling that he’s not really getting better at it: His screenplay barely touches upon the possibilities of his premise, his directing barely gets the point across, his cinematographic decisions are repetitive, and his frantic editing preference undermines the effectiveness of his own direction. (If anyone wants to pass a law mandating that one second is the minimum amount of time a cut should be, I’m all for it on the basis of this film alone.)  Even the wall-to-wall CGI feels uninvolving despite scary huge monsters. It makes for a curiously forgettable film—yeah, sure, Jovovich fights monsters but there’s really no reason to remember the rest. Monster Hunter seems determined to launch a new series, perhaps as a replacement for the played-out Resident Evil franchise. We’ll see how that goes.