MONSTER HUNTER
GAME ADAP MOSTLY WORKS ON ONE LEVEL…
Milla vs. mega-beasts in the desert; think Resident Evil with fewer Umbrellas.
MONSTER HUNTER 12A OUT 18 JUNE CINEMAS
Inspired by the Capcom game series, Paul W.S. Anderson’s (Resident Evil) latest is loud, violent, CG-heavy and mildly bonkers. Milla Jovovich plays Captain Artemis, an Army Ranger leading a quest for missing soldiers when a huge sandstorm spirits her unit into a dusty altdimension. Within minutes, her team is savaged by outlandish creatures; narrowly escaping the slaughter, Artemis meets, fights and inevitably joins forces with a character known only as Hunter (Ong Bak’s Tony Jaa).
The pixel-based beasties are impressively rendered, but the storytelling is messy. Only when Ron Perlman arrives in the second half as The Admiral do we get some belated exposition. Game fans will be pleased to see that Anderson has included one of the most beloved figures in the franchise, the Meowscular Chef. This feline Jamie Oliver, a companion of The Admiral, adds much-needed humour to the relentless monster-bashing, which is largely straight out of the Starship Troopers playbook. The shadow of Cameron’s Aliens also looms large.
Jovovich hurls herself into a role that requires plenty of brawn, if not a great deal of subtlety, while Jaa’s sheer athleticism is always a pleasure to watch. Meanwhile, the location lensing (it was shot in South Africa, rather than entirely in front of greenscreen) adds some real-world heft to the spectacle. Not the worst game-to-movie adap, then, but still rather hollow and forgettable. James Mottram