While there are some old Taiwanese film i could have choose, i do like to eventually check in with some more modern film made by China, as in Mainland “Taipei is gonna be ours eventually” China, and maybe this time something that doesn’t exactly fall into the “web movie” Asylum-esque category, as in something actually meant for theathers.
Also, this bucks the general trend of these Chinese monster film being overly short, as this is almost 2 hours long… not for the best, but first, plot.
Which one would assume it’s like the starting chapter of Bleach but swapping the genders of Ichigo and Rukia, since Letterboxed’s synopsis is worded in a way that you’d assume this was based on a shonen manga of sorts, but nope, it’s actually about a girl, Ji Mo, an outcast due to her ability to see things no other people can. Not ghosts or spirits, but monsters, which of course made others think she’s just a psycho and for which she has been sent to the looney bin once before.
Her life changes when she meets a monster hunter, and discovers she has an important role to play in adverting a coming disaster…
The recurring sticking point i saw in various critiques of this is was basically this film not knowing who the hell its target audiences is or wants it to be…. and i can’t deny the sentiment, it’s hard to tell because it’s tonally all over the place, and it’s also stuck in an awkward, paradoxical spot in terms of it being oddly too grounded for a fantasy film.
There are fantasy elements, yes, with magic, monsters, paper amulets, spells, but because it’s all over the place it’s often more than not being a depressing drama about people treating this girl like utter shit, AFTER being a kooky family film light in tone and colorful in visuals where even monster hunters don’t kill monsters that are often more cute than anything.. and even those that are meant to be scary still end up being too cute for their own good, even though the designs themselves ain’t bad at all, less generic than one would expect, even if not exactly memorable.
A lacking worldbuilding doesn’t help in selling these things as dangerous, they try but since we’re not explained much about the monster world and what we see of these in the real world really doesn’t properly sell these as a malevolent calamity that has to be averted, nor it dwells into the ethics of “monster hunting” since the hunters ultimately just send the monsters back to their own world, despite using talisman powered magic guns and weapons, because it’s a family film after all.
The CG is actually fairly decent-to-good, even though – as expected of this kind of Chinese genre films – a bit dated and still having a videogame-y quality to it, especially in the final act the effects make it feel like you’ve stepped into a series of unskippable PS3 cutscenes.
This is such a frustrating movie to review, stuck in betweens, both too real to be proper whimsical, too depressingly miserable to remain lighthearted in tone, too hectic or graphic for something supposedly aimed at a very young audience so nothing sticks, i get the feeling it means well and mostly wants to be a family fantasy film but can’t properly decide what tone to stick to, nor it’s able to properly juggle drama and whimsy, hence it’s just so all over the place in a way that doesn’t entertain but mystifies and boggles the meat mind.
Its also not well paced, as it drags on and the plot literally takes a break mid-movie, basically to save and chill out a bit before the final boss battle, forcing the characters to potter and loiter about in place while the game loads, basically, in an attempt to have some calm scenes after some heated action and help with characterization… a noble attempt that just feels like brash and overly dictated by the script unsubtly trying to organically weave some personality and motivation via flashbacks, which doesn’t help too much anyway since the characters aren’t that interesting either.
Again, not the worse, and it’s not that long, but it kills the pacing even more due to its placing straight up in the middle of the movie (the logic i assume because the second act is technically always slower in pacing anyway), it leading to a final showdown not anticlimactic per sé but still feeling so because it hinges on the protagonist being ouright stupid just because the movie otherwise would be shorter and the actress playing the villain hasn’t gone through her mandated quota of “give up/seduce to the dark side of the Force” lines.
A plot that is also not that original or interesting, it’s that old chestnut of being two intertwined worlds that are separated but balance each other out, something is about to disrupt the balance, etcetera etcetera etcetera. You can guess the rest, and i won’t spoil it, regardless.
There are some standout scenes like the temporal loop car chase, there are, and it’s not boring, but it’s the kind of okay film that will have you indeed question who the hell is the intented target audience for this? I assume kids and families, but even with big flaming bone dragon monsters it still feel too grounded to be proper fantastical, even as villainesses rise in literal gulfs of darkness, doing paradoxically very little yet too much in many ways that matter.
Ultimately, Monster Run it’s not bad or unlikeable, acting is ok, but expecially for a blockbuster level production, it’s such an undecisive film that will feel longer than it is, and will leave viewers not bored but confused as the overall vision can’t properly committ to any of the tones it unsuccessfully tries to juggle with, so it just mushes them all together.
It’s worth a watch at least, especially if by the time you read this is still on Netflix or some other streaming service, but it’s definitely one of those that you won’t be rushing to see over and over again, unless you’re searching for an example of how important is to decide for whom you’re making a film, since not actually providing a reply to this question isn’t “ outsmarting the system” or the 4d dimensional chess move you think it is.
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