Monster Hunter Got Buried During The Pandemic, But Is It Worth Watching On Netflix?
A lot of great films got buried in 2020 due to Covid. Some of them, like "The Empty Man" and "Freaky," thankfully gained a second lease on life on the home market after playing to mostly-empty theaters. Others, sadly, came and went with very little fanfare, as seemed to be the case with Armando Iannucci's delightful Charles Dickens adaptation, "The Personal History of David Copperfield." This brings us to "Monster Hunter," a 2020 release that has recently found its way onto Netflix's global top 10 charts. But it is a hidden gem that was done dirty by the pandemic or another barely-functional genre movie that people are "rediscovering" because it hit the right taste clusters?
First, a little context. "Monster Hunter" is based on the Capcom video game/multimedia property of the same name, which takes place in a pre-industrial fantasy world populated by a menagerie of, well, monsters. In the games, you play a Hunter, a warrior-for-hire who protects villagers from these monsters while aiding those who seek to study and better understand the creatures. In contrast to that, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson's live-action "Monster Hunter" film casts Milla Jovovich as U.S. Army Ranger Captain Natalie Artemis. An original character created for the film, Artemis — along with her United Nations military squad — gets pulled into a portal to a world populated by giant monsters, which she must then proceed to hack and slash her way through to make it back to Earth.
So, a Paul W.S. Anderson video game movie adaptation starring Milla Jovovich that plays fast-and-loose with the original games' lore? If your immediate assumption is "Monster Hunter" is basically one of Anderson and Jovovich's "Resident Evil" films with zombies swapped out for monsters, you're not far off. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, it depends on what you're looking for from a film called "Monster Hunter."
A '00s action flick released in 2020
Watching "Monster Hunter," you're often struck by how much it looks and feels like a 2000s sci-fi/fantasy/horror action flick that got locked away in a vault for years before releasing in 2020. The human characters are barely even archetypes, the storytelling and the world-building are spartan at best, and the CGI monsters tend to seem weightless, creating a disconnect between them and the actors. Paul W.S. Anderson also recycles a lot of the same techniques he used over the course of his "Resident Evil" films, relying on ramped-up editing and slow-mo flourishes to add a little spice to the monotonous scenes of characters fighting in close quarters or fleeing rampaging beasties.
Again, this isn't necessarily a defect. "Monster Hunter" prioritizes forward momentum above all else and there's something to be admired about a mid-budget, major studio-backed B-movie that doesn't shy away from its underlying pulpiness. Nor, for that matter, does the film have any pretenses about its own mythology; it's here to showcase actors like Milla Jovovich and martial arts superstar Tony Jaa (who portrays a nameless Hunter) killing monsters real good, and the monsters themselves are varied enough to keep things interesting (they range from venomous, gigantic arachnids to spiky, fire-breathing dragons). Would that more franchises embraced their inherent silliness without pretending they're somehow above their source material or winking a little too much at the audience.
The only real problem is "Monster Hunter" doesn't go far enough in embracing the weirder aspects of the property, such as the cat-like Hunters known as Felynes/Palicos. Even the whole "protagonist gets portaled to a fantasy realm" trope has a cheeseball throwback charm, as does Anderson's filmmaking (which, ironically, comes across as less generic in the current action landscape than it would've in the '00s). In that respect, it might just be the perfect Netflix movie ... and all which that implies.