Monster Hunter is an action-monster movie based on a video game series of the same name, and it came out on December 18. It was written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, the same guy who did the Resident Evil movies, and it's about a group of soldiers who get sucked into another world filled with huge, vicious monsters.
I had a few problems with this movie, but by far the biggest one was the monsters. If you're going to make a dumb, fun monster movie, you have to have fun monsters, but this one didn't. For about the first hour of the film (and it's only an hour and forty minutes long), pretty much the only creatures you see are these giant spider-like things, and while they're cool enough, they get boring rather quickly. This kind of movie needs variety in its monsters (like Kong: Island or this year's underseen gem Love and Monsters), and an hour of giant spiders is the exact opposite of that.
To be fair, there is one creature that's not a spider, but it's not terribly interesting either. It's basically just a generic burrowing monster à la Tremors or the sand worms from Beetlejuice. It's not bad, but it doesn't add nearly enough variety to this first part of the film.
Then, in about the last forty minutes of the movie, you see some different monsters, but rather than make you excited to see something new, they just make you realize how derivative the film is. We've seen giant spiders and burrowing monsters a million times before, and this second batch isn't any different. Some of them look like dinosaurs (there's even a stampede scene that reminded me a lot of Jurassic Park), there's a dragon that looks like a knockoff of Smaug from the Hobbit trilogy, and there's another monster that looks like a cross between a dragon and a xenomorph. Admittedly, a xenomorph-dragon sounds pretty cool, but in the context of this movie, it's just another derivative creature that doesn't add anything new or interesting to the genre.
That's all pretty bad, but to be honest, I might've been able to forgive it if the human characters were fun to watch. Unfortunately, they weren't. Almost all of the soldiers die in the first few minutes, and then the one survivor teams up with someone who's been there for much longer and who knows the ins and outs of that world. Paul W. S. Anderson could've done some pretty interesting stuff with that setup, but he instead chose to make his characters paper thin. They're not terrible; there's just nothing particularly likeable about them. In fact, they're so generic that they're almost not even real characters. They're just excuses to see more monsters, and given how bad the monsters are, that's not a good thing.
Last but not least, we have the final twenty or thirty minutes of the movie. This last bit opens up the world a little and implies that there's a lot of mythology behind this place and these monsters, but the film holds it all back like a tall kid holding a candy bar above his head while a short kid tries in vain to reach it. It's really frustrating, and it's made even worse by the final scene. It ends kind of like the original Mortal Kombat, with the good guys getting ready to square off against another monster right before the credits roll, and it feels like the filmmakers purposely held off on explaining the mythology just to get us to come back for a sequel. It felt like a big slap in the face, and it killed any last vestige of interest I may have had in a potential sequel.
So all in all, I would not recommend that you go see this movie. It's just a mix of elements taken from other (and better) films and put together into a frustratingly unsatisfying story. If you like dumb, fun monster movies, go watch something like Rampage, Pacific Rim, or just about any Godzilla movie. They're all much better ways to spend your time than Monster Hunter.
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