The Improbable Adventures of Milla Jovovich

I swear I didn’t intend to watch and review a series of Paul W.S. Anderson collabs with his wife, Milla Jovovich. It just so happens that as I was browsing the various streaming services they kept recommending these films to me. “Sure, I’ll watch the most recent film from the duo, In the Lost Lands, which I heard was horrible. And sure, I remember The Three Musketeers being awful, but in a fun way. Why not? And I guess I did miss out on Monster Hunter. I suppose I can find out if it was as bad as everyone said…”

Of the three, Monster Hunter was the biggest stretch for me. I haven’t actually played any of the games before, so I don’t know much about the series or any of the in-franchise mythology. There are monsters and you fight them, right? What I did know was that the trailer for the film looked like incomprehensible trash, which makes sense because most of what Paul W.S. Anderson makes is incomprehensible trash. I assumed if this film was anything like Anderson’s work on the Resident EvilFirst released a Biohazard, the Resident Evil games, and eventually movies (awkwardly and clumsily) tell the stories of a world ravaged by zombies and the greedy corporate, Umbrella, seeking to profit from the mess. series, the movie would be nothing like the games and it would mostly be a love letter to his wife, Jovovich, who he seems to think is the most glorious action star ever.

I have to think I’m right on all counts. This film is a love letter to Jovovich, writing in a character for her that (I would bet) doesn’t exist in the game series at all. She runs around, fights some monsters (although not as many as you’d expect from the name on the tin), and has improbable adventures next to a legitimate action star who, frankly, should have been the real star of the film. It all combines into a film with little plot, barely any action, that then ends abruptly right as it was finally finding its footing. This may, in fact, be one of the worst Paul W.S. Anderson movies I’ve seen yet, and that wasn’t a high bar to clear.

The film opens with Milla Jovovich as Natalie Artemis, a US Army Ranger and head of a UN security team, out in an unnamed desert, searching for survivors. A previous team had been sent out into this desert (for reasons unknown) and they disappeared. Artemis’s team is supposed to find them, or some trace of them, and report back. Get the survivors if they can, but mostly come back alive. Unfortunately for her team, they aren’t really going to be able to make good on that second part.

While out in the desert, the team is hit by a very strange sand and lightning storm. They’re blown way off course and, when they all wake up, they find that they’re in a very different desert on a very different world. And, almost immediately, they’re attacked by a giant monster. Artemis loses half her crew in the initial attack, and when she and the survivors flee to the nearby mountain, they get attacked by different, spider-like creatures who then kill just about everyone else on her team. Everyone except Artemis. The Ranger is then forced to team up with a local warrior, the Hunter (Tony Jaa), who seems to know how to survive in this world. Together they might just have a chance of crossing the desert, reaching a safe place and, maybe, sending Artemis back home.

There’s no better way to put this: despite the giant monsters, lots of CGI, and a ton of special effects, Monster Hunter is boring. The key reason for that is because the film is a largely formless void with little in the way of storytelling or monster hunting. The team of Rangers gets themselves stuck in a new desert and they hang out around a mountain for almost an hour of the runtime, with most of the team getting picked off early on. The film then drags things out for a while because it really only has one goal: get Artemis back home so she can fight a giant monster. The entire film is clearly set up to get us to that point, and it spends nearly an hour and a half to get there.

I think the film wastes so much time because it doesn’t really know what to do. In focusing the film on a new character, Artemis, instead of an established character from the game series, the movie can’t simply take an existing game plot and adapt it to the screen. Anderson has done this before, in the Resident Evil films, which went so off book in comparison to the games they were based on that they exist in their own, completely different continuity. Anderson was just making stuff up on the fly as he saw fit there, and Monster Hunter (which he also wrote) does the same thing.

Somewhere in this script is a monster horror film that could have been cool. Take a bunch of people, throw them in an inescapable situation, and then, one by one, have them get picked off by/ horrors until there’s only one person left alive. I know Anderson knows how to make that kind of film because he did it in the first Resident Evil. Instead of that, though, Monster Hunter kills off Artemis’s crew in the first hour, and then spends a lot of time waiting around before it can get to its climax. So we wait on the mountain while Artemis and the Hunter, who don’t speak the same language, motion at each other from time to time in attempts to communicate. They watch the monsters, but don’t hunt them, and they wait. This film is full of waiting. It’s just as thrilling as it sounds.

When we finally do get action, from time to time, it’s just as bad as the story. Jovovich is not an action star, not in the same way that Jaa is. She’s okay doing certain poses, and performing certain moves, but she really doesn’t have true action star chops. Because of that, the film has to constantly cut and edit around her, making for a hard to watch, choppy mess. Even when Jaa is on screen, Anderson sticks to the frenetic cuts and constant editing, making even his normally superlative action impossible to see. This is an action film where you can barely understand the action, so you don’t care what happens.

Of course, setting the characters up to fight exclusively CGI monsters doesn't help matters. Yes, this is called Monster Hunter, so the film has to have the heroes fight monsters, but so much of what happens on screen is just digital trickery without any weight or reality to it. Watching Jovovich fly at a dragon due to wirework on a green screen feels like empty calories. A little bit of your lizard brain fires off, but the CGI looks bad, the effects are weightless, and nothing really happens. It’s all devoid of fun or meaning, just characters going through the motions. A little bit of practical effects, some time spent making everything feel more real, could have helped.

About the only thing I did like was the acting. Not from Jovovich, mind you, who delivers one of her worst, flattest performances yet. It’s the characters around her, like Tony Jaa, who do so much to sell this film. Jaa is great, even though the film makes it so he can’t speak her language and has to emote everything. He delivers an awesome performance, desperately trying to make this film work, and if the movie could have been about him instead of Jovovich’s Artemis I think it would have been ten times better than what we got.

Deep down, though, I simply think there’s no way to save this film. A live-action adaptation helmed by Anderson and starring Jovovich was going to fail no matter what. To do this film right you have to focus it on characters from the game series, set the action in a more consistently realistic world, and ditch both the director and his favorite female star. I really think this film should have been done as anime, start to finish, helmed by a completely different team. The second Anderson signed on (which he apparently did eight years before the film even came out) set the movie up to fail. There was no saving it, and the end results only prove that.