6.5 / 10
Monster Hunter is cheesy, and I’ve seen it three times, so I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it. Paul W.S. Anderson adapted Capcom’s game series into exactly what the games are: a person, a big weapon, a bigger monster, repeat.
Milla Jovovich plays Artemis, an Army Ranger captain whose unit drives into a storm and comes out somewhere else. Tony Jaa plays the Hunter who finds her. Ron Perlman turns up late as the Admiral, in a wig that deserves its own credit.
It cost about $60 million and made roughly $42 million in a pandemic year, and that killed the sequel it was clearly built for. It’s a 6.5: dumb, loud, watchable, and structurally unfinished.
The Setup
Artemis and her team are searching for a missing patrol in the desert when a lightning storm swallows their vehicles. They wake in a place with two moons, black sand and things living under it.
The first monster is a Diablos, a horned thing the size of a building that swims through sand. It takes the unit apart in about ten minutes of screen time, and from there Artemis is alone.
She meets the Hunter, a man with no shared language and a great deal of experience, and the middle of the film is the two of them learning to work together well enough to kill the thing that’s hunting them both.
The Jovovich and Jaa Show
The central stretch is nearly wordless. Artemis and the Hunter can’t talk to each other, so they fight, then eat, then fight the monster instead of each other. Jovovich and Jaa carry twenty minutes on physicality alone, and it’s the best part of the film.
Jovovich has been doing this for Anderson since Resident Evil in 2002, and she’s very good at it: convincing with a weapon, willing to be thrown around, and never winking at the camera. Hollywood criminally underuses Tony Jaa, and this at least lets him move. The chocolate bar scene, where two people with nothing in common find one thing they agree on, is the most charm the film has, and it’s my favorite thing in the movie. It’s goofy and sweet, and I’d happily have taken another ten minutes of these two failing to communicate before anybody else showed up.
The Monsters
The creature work is the reason to watch. The Diablos is a real threat, with weight and sound design to match, and the Rathalos, the flying one, gives the last act a target worth the fuss. Anderson shoots them properly: full-body shots in daylight, clear geography, and a sense of scale that most modern monster films lose in murk and shaky cameras. You can always see what’s happening.
I think this is Anderson’s real gift, and I wish directors with bigger budgets would steal it. When the Diablos comes up out of the sand, I can see the whole animal, and that’s worth more to me than any amount of shaky-cam chaos.
The film also gets the game’s central loop right. Track the monster, learn its behavior, exploit a weakness, use a weapon that shouldn’t be liftable by a human. Players recognized it immediately.
For Writers
Anderson shoots his monsters in daylight, from far enough back to show the whole creature, and the fights read clearly because of it. Hiding your threat in darkness and fast cutting can conceal cheap effects, and it also robs the audience of scale. When you write action, make sure the reader always knows where everyone is standing and how big the problem is. Draw the geography of your set piece before you write it. If you can’t sketch it, your reader won’t be able to picture it either, and confusion kills tension faster than anything else.
Paul W.S. Anderson
Anderson has spent twenty-five years making films out of video games, starting with Mortal Kombat in 1995 and running through six Resident Evil pictures. Critics have never had time for him. Audiences kept turning up until the pandemic.
What he’s good at is spatial clarity. His action scenes are built so you always know where the exits are, how far the monster is, and what the plan is. That sounds basic, and it’s rarer than it should be.
He also knows what his films are. There’s no attempt here to make a serious statement about anything, and the absence of self-importance is refreshing in a modern blockbuster.
For Writers
Anderson’s films get dismissed, and his action still reads more clearly than that of directors with four times the budget, because he never breaks the geography. Craft in one area can make up for weakness in others. When you write, know which element you’re best at and build your scenes around that strength. Name the thing you do better than most writers. Then check your current chapter is using it, instead of asking your weakest skill to handle the moment.
The Sequel That Never Came
Mid-story is where the film ends. The portal is still open, the Admiral arrives with a crew and a plan, monsters come through to our world, and the credits roll on a cliffhanger nobody ever resolved.
That’s the biggest flaw. Everything about the structure, the late introduction of Perlman, the barely explained tower, the unanswered questions about the two worlds, exists to set up a second film that the box office killed.
A franchise opener has to work as a film first. This one mostly does, and then the last five minutes throw it away on a cliffhanger for a sequel that never came. That ending is the film’s worst decision, because it turns a finished creature feature into a pilot episode.
The Cheese
The dialogue is functional at best. The human characters in the opening are types with one line each, the jokes land about half the time, and the score does its work with a sledgehammer.
Some of those lines made me wince, and the early banter in Artemis’s unit is the weakest stretch of the film for me. I didn’t miss any of those soldiers once the Diablos was done with them. For the Chinese release, the film also cut a line that caused a pun-based controversy and got it pulled from cinemas there, costing it the market most likely to save it.
None of that ruins it. This is a film about a woman with a sword the size of a door fighting a dragon in a canyon, and it delivers that at a high standard.
For Writers
A cliffhanger for a sequel that never arrived closes Monster Hunter, and the last five minutes undo some of the goodwill the film earned. Never spend your ending setting up a book that may not exist. When you write a series opener, close the story you started and let the hook be a door instead of a missing wall. Check whether your final chapter resolves the question your first chapter asked. If it only promises an answer in book two, you have a problem no marketing can fix, and the reviews will say so.
Why I’ve Watched It Three Times
Because it’s exactly what it says it is. There’s no pretension, no lore dump, no attempt to be more than a creature feature, and it moves fast enough that ninety-nine minutes go by easily.
The Diablos fight, the chocolate bar, the Rathalos in the last act and Perlman’s hair are all worth revisiting, and none of it demands anything from a viewer.
That’s a 6.5. It’s cheesy, it’s incomplete, and I keep putting it on anyway.
Craft Note
Craft Note
When Monster Hunter trusts its images and stops talking, it works. The best twenty minutes have no dialogue at all: two people who can’t speak to each other learning to fight the same enemy. Action writing is the same. When the situation is clear enough, explanation only slows it down.
Is Monster Hunter worth watching?
If you like monster films, yes. The creature work is excellent, the Jovovich and Jaa stretch in the middle is a lot of fun, and it never pretends to be anything but a big dumb creature feature. It’s a 6.5, held down by thin dialogue and an ending that sets up a sequel that never came. I’ve seen it three times, so make of that what you like.
