Movies based on video games is like an instant death sentence. For some reason movie production companies, screenwriters, and directors have never been able to crack the formula on adapting video games into really good movies and I don’t understand why.

I’m talking Mortal Kombat and Assassin’s Creed or the most maddening of all of the adaptations, Warcraft based on the super fun PC game World of Warcraft whose story is just as expansive and epic as The Lord of the Rings and yet was a total bust in cinematic form. Now yesterday I watched the last game adaptation to join that long list of awful game adaptation movies: Monster Hunter.

You may not know this but I’m an avid gamer. I play video games regularly and am a particular fan of the Destiny games, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Rocket League, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, the old Star Wars: Force Unleashed game, the Xenoblade Chronicles game, The Legend of Zelda, and MarioKart…but I’ve also played Monster Hunter.

Monster Hunter is a game that I was never really fond of. I’ve fleetingly played the game on both my Wii and Xbox One but wasn’t a fan. The actual game is pretty boring because there is no real plot. You’re just running around, picking up quests to go kill monsters with your giant weapon of choice, and then you return back to the village to give yourself upgrades. That’s it!

But I have played this game enough to know it well. So this is what I’ll say about the Monster Hunter movie.

It was very faithful to the game. The monsters, the characters, the anguish and the never-ending sense of fighting. Yeah, that’s Monster Hunter for you.

This movie’s first half was actually quite fun as it gets to the nitty-gritty pretty quickly and then once it does it doesn’t want to seem to let go of your attention. But then the second half and everything spiraled out of control.

Whoever was in control of the slow motion was rather heavy-handed through the action sequences in the latter half of the movie, providing many eye-rollable moments. The story sped up by a thousand mph and the action sequences, which were pretty good at first, seemed to rapidly deteriorate in quality until the film was just annoying.

I really thought Monster Hunter was going to be the best game adaptation I’d seen but Assassin’s Creed, despite its flaws, still owns that title by far. Heck, maybe the new Mortal Kombat movie will finally be worthy…psyche.

I thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day.