“The Hunt” tries to tackle America’s zeitgeist by riffing on Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” and pitting liberal elites preying on Trump’s “deplorables” for sport. A 2019 fall release before it was pulled due to its controversial topic, not to mention Donald Trump tweeting about it, “The Hunt” is a 90-minute B-movie that wants to be more relevant than it actually is.
If you do finally watch the movie, then you will soon realize that the controversy was unwarranted, since the liberal “elites” who are featured in it and pay top dollar to hunt Bible belt residents for the thrill of it, are arrogant, brash and, quite clearly, the antagonists of the picture. Yes, someone refers to an unnamed president as “our ratfucker-in-chief,” we see texts about using “deplorables” as target practice, but, politics aside, this is a pretty thin and unsubstantial movie. All it really wants to do is entertain. Nothing wrong with that. But it all feels rather …empty.
After being drugged, our deplorables wake up in a field with gag balls attached to their faces, running for their lives. They’re being systematically killed off, one by one, via sniper rifles, landmines, and other such lethal concoctions. Before we get to our main character’s perspective, Zobel decides to juggle a number of different viewpoints to continually surprise the audience. Escaping the liberal wrath is Crystal (Betty Gilpin), a military veteran from Mississippi who served in Afghanistan. Calm, cool and collected, she uses the lethal skills she learned overseas to kill off her hunters one by one.
The elites are led by the unseen Athena (Hilary Swank), a corporate shark who appears to be the brains behind the whole operation. Of course, we all know where it will lead: Crystal and Athena will eventually meet for an overlong Kill Bill-style hustle. Suffice to say, once we do arrive at that destination, the movie falls flat and uneventful.
The brains behind “The Hunt” are Blumhouse producer, Jason Blum, and director Crag Zobel (“Compliance”). They equally mock the right and the left’s paranoia but fail to make potent satire out of it. If anything, “The Hunt” is exploitation cinema, and right vs left politics are only used as an excuse to pump up the violence. The screenplay, written by Zobel himself, is a lazily written amalgam of Americana cliches that don’t build any kind of humane voices to the narrative. Instead, we have caricatures in “The Hunt” with only Gilpin’s lean, mean killing machine left for us to root for.
One does wonder what all the fuss was about. “The Hunt” is pointless and refuses to really take sides. It is neither left nor right, but just American. Too scared to truly provoke, too pointless to truly sting. If anything, this is a good opportunity for audiences to familiarize themselves with Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s genre hybrid, “Bacurau,” which explored eerily similar themes, and has Brazil’s elites hunting down native small-towners, but did it with the kind of artful urgency that is severely lacking in Zobel’s film.[C]
And just like that, after Venice and Telluride, the Best Actor race is taking shape, with Andrew Scott (“Elsinore”) and John Malkovich (“Wild Horse Nine”) emerging as major contenders.