Monster Hunter - Entertaining Fantasy Movie for Pure Action Fans

This movie has been playing in Indonesian cinemas for a while but like in previous cases, my wife and I opted not to see them due to the pandemic. So it was quite a pleasant surprise when I got notification that Catchplay+ was going to have this movie on their platform starting from 4th of March. Anyway, I'm going to start with my views now.

Brief Story Line

A group of armies led by Lt. Artemis (Milla Jovovich - Hellboy 2019 version, Future World etc) which included several soldiers such as Lincoln (Tip "T.I" Harris - Ant-man and the Wasp etc), Marshall (Diego Boneta - Terminator: Dark Fate etc) and few others were trying to look for another unit who called for help earlier. But when they reached the destination, somehow they were transported to another world where big monsters exist and they had to fight for their lives.

In this other world a mysterious warrior who was also a monster hunter (Tony Jaa - Triple Threat, Tom-yum-goong etc) was trying to help Artemis and the others. There would later be another person who was the leader of the hunters called Admiral (Ron Perlman - Reprisal TV series, Pacific Rim etc).

So could Artemis return to their world while fighting against the monsters? You could find it all in this exciting action movie.

End of Brief Story Line

It's been a while since I was entertained by a pop corn movie like this and I really enjoyed watching this film. It has the necessary ingredients for action fans like me such as fantastic action, great special effects, some cool hand to hand combat and obviously seeing the heroes fighting against enormous monsters. 

As an action film, I thought it really delivered. It was suspenseful and exciting at the same time. I could only imagine if I had seen this in studio with Dolby Atmos sound system. Oh yes this one has that sound effect as I noticed during the closing credit. Btw there was a mid end credit scene which also hinted a possible sequel (especially with such ending).

The movie itself was adapted from popular video game series from famous Japanese game developer  Capcom. Probably explained why there was the name Toho Japan as one of the distribution company. It was directed by Paul W. S. Anderson who has had vast experience in directing multiple films adapted from video game such as Mortal Kombat (1995), several Resident Evil movies including Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and other action movies. Fun fact: Milla Jovovich is the wife of Anderson and they met during the making of Resident Evil. With such portfolio in his hands, it's no wonder why this movie was enjoyable.

Now I get why critics did not really like this movie because there was no real story and no character depth or intelligent dialogues. But in this particular film, I did not really care. For me this is just for entertainment and something that made me realize I am truly missing watching such kind of movie in a cinema. Well let's just hope this pandemic will be over soon and we can start going to cinemas without worry. In the mean time though, you can watch it from your own home by paying certain amount to Catchplay+. 

Overall, this is a movie suitable for fans of action movie. As long as you are not too particular with the story/characters development, then you should be able to enjoy this. I could already imagine if I watched it together with my wife, she would be screaming excitedly more than few times during the movie. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars