[J Harker]

Monsters. 2010, Gareth Evans.
Utter bollocks, turned it off halfway through, which takes some doing for me.
The fact that off the back of this film the director, Gareth Evans got the chance to direct the (relatively) recent Godzilla reboot, a film which barely featured the title character, should have told me something. At least Godzilla had some interesting characters, the painfully underused Bryan Cranston being a standout.
In Monsters a Nasa space probe has returned with evidence of alien dna, unfortunately the thing has crash landed in Mexico and massive alien lifeforms have begun appearing.
The story begins six years later so effectively is told against the backdrop of these events. An American journalist in Mexico is charged with escorting his bosses daughter back through a now quarantined zone to the American border to safety.
And here in lies the problem, in the hour and a bit that i watched nothing really happens. Yes the American journalist chap and the bosses daughter slowly make there way across an infected Mexico, we see various forms of state corruption and capitalisation on the events. But so what? The characters are uninteresting charisma vacuums which is probably the films greatest failing, but then relying on them to carry our attention while the Monsters of the title fail to appear is just fatal. What you get is like a Dracula movie without Dracula, or a zombie movie with no zombies, or heaven forbid a Godzilla movie where Godzilla hardly shows up. Maybe its me but i just don't see the point, if someone had bothered to make its lead characters likeable or interesting then at least there are scenes that would have been quite tense and thrilling. As it is i turned it off.