Monster Hunter, review: Milla Jovovich vs giant spiders makes for one loud, silly romp

• Dir: Paul WS Anderson. Starring: Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, Meagan Good, Diego Boneta, T.I. 12A cert, 104 mins

Monster Hunter started life as a 2004 action role-playing game on the PlayStation 2, and has expanded to become a mammoth success, luring in a new generation with the 2018 upgrade Monster Hunter: World. It’s second only to the Resident Evil series as a hit title for its developer, Capcom – and given the profitability of the latter’s film spin-offs, it was only a matter of time before this one got converted into an IMAX-compatible shoot-em-up.

With an inevitability that has progressed over the years to become actively reassuring, directing duties have fallen to Paul WS Anderson, the British genre specialist whose track record in adapting video games into effects-heavy action flicks is nothing if not prolific. (Mortal Kombat, Alien vs Predator and four of the Resident Evils are his babies.)

Unlike his fellow Andersons (Wes and Paul Thomas), this one has always had a rough ride from critics, who have collectively ensured that not one of his dozen films to date has come close to a “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Monster Hunter is easily among the best, and even this currently languishes at 46 per cent.) He’s been helped of late, and on this occasion, by the willingness of his wife, Milla Jovovich, to step up as some version of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (a constant Anderson touchstone) every time they’re back on set.

For this one, Jovovich plays Natalie Artemis, the captain of a US Army Ranger team searching for missing squaddies in the desert. Before you can say “the lightning storm in Mad Max: Fury Road”, they are pulled into a markedly similar tempest which transports them, for whatever reason, into another dimension. Here these few scattered humans do battle with enormous wyverns travelling through sand (hello Tremors, hello Dune), giant spiders that make Shelob look slothful, and other supersized fauna.

Originality has never been Anderson’s forte, but his skill at splicing together compatible ideas from decades of SF/horror is consistently underrated, and he usually knows what his audience wants. When Jovovich is bitten by one of the spiders and trussed up in an underground cocoon, we do want the showy pull-back to reveal a gargantuan, seething web through which she now has to grope her way to an exit. This part is the Aliens finale crossed with the predicament of The Descent, and they get on just dandily.

When she encounters some kind of post-apocalyptic warrior-survivor known only as Hunter, played by the Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa, we do not want this pair to sit and make dainty chit-chat. Instead, much like Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy did, they leap at each other’s throats on sight, and are deadlocked in combat, in this instance for about 10 minutes, on the deck of a beached, derelict pirate ship. It’s stupidly diverting, even when it makes no sense.

Monster Hunter’s ace in the hole is in keeping this duo from verbally communicating at all. They forge an alliance through gestures and signs, giving the film a kinship to something like Enemy Mine (1985) or John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), as two apparent foes with no common language suss out each other’s usefulness through a series of scrapes. It helps that Jaa, still astonishingly sprightly at 45, is such a good-humoured sport, jumping about in fetching furry armour and cheekily trolling his new buddy in no time.

Not everything pans out quite so well. Anderson dispenses with dialogue so niftily through the film’s sun-bleached middle that it’s a mystery why anyone has to start talking again. Also, with all the fondness in the world towards Ron Perlman, his late-arriving role as a kind of desert-world Captain Ahab isn’t the galvanising bonus it should be. The two leads have established such an amusing mutual support system, and then suddenly, there’s a crowd. Plus, he looks like Rod Stewart after a run-in with a swarm of bees. The appearance of a one-eyed humanoid cat creature called a Palico, which is also a pirate chef, is baffling and trippy, and I speak as someone who actually owns the Monster Hunter game’s latest incarnation.

Save for the spider-lair stuff, all the scenes in darkness look relatively crummy compared with the ones in dazzling sunlight, which make great use of barren locations in the Namib desert and Jovovich’s ever-durable cheekbones. Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

In cinemas on Friday