Reviews

THE HUNTED
William Friedkin
U.S., 2003

The Hunted, the new movie by 70's hang-over William Friedkin, starts out with a queasy bang, jettisoning us into Kosovo circa 1993, and, before we know it, proceeds to rub our noses in a squib-popping pogrom that's, like, totally intense. Between handsomely staged mass executions slithers best-of-the-best ranger Aaron Hallam (Benicio del Toro), out on an elite assassination mission, pausing only to contemplate the sight of a doe-eyed waif pulling her prize stuffed animal from under the still-warm corpse of her mother. Friedkin, you see, is one of those filmmakers who knows that the sick tragedy of genocide can only really hit home with the maudlin help of a sad widdle Precious Moments figurine whose mama won't wake up. Flash-forward to present day, where a burned-out, paranoid Hallam has taken to stalking and vivisecting big-game hunters in the American Northwest, but not before taunting them with loony dialogue like: "Why don't you kill with your own hands? There is no reverence in what you do." Those who can expect much from The Hunted after these auspicious beginnings are made of more optimistic stuff than me.

Our attention next turns to the backwoods of Northern Canada, where we meet "wildlife fund" employee L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), a retired Special Ops trainer living a secluded, outward-bound existence, whose Luddite solitude is soon interrupted by the arrival of federal marshals. They've come to drag the hesitant old bloodhound out on del Toro's trail, who was, we learn, a former star pupil of Jones's. These fragments of obligatory set-up safely behind us, established with all the dull patience of a weary uphill grind on a piece of rusty carnival equipment, The Hunted sends us whooshing off on a 90-odd minute chase, and with a superfluous FBI agent (Connie Nielsen, bringing at least a dash of scrubbed prettiness to these dull proceedings) gamely bringing up the rear.

At its most basic level The Hunted has all the makings of a fine, grubby outdoors actioneer: an expressive Jack London locale, macho melodramatics, and, most importantly, a great pair of game, rough-hewn actors. Del Toro and Jones are both throwbacks to a yesteryear tradition of tough, man's man actors now eclipsed by a present-day vogue for waxed, tanned, and buffed Tom of Finland androids who collect their paychecks for awkwardly leaping away from whooshing CGI fireballs. Jones exudes confident off-hand expertise and walks with the bow-legged trundle of an ex-athlete; he's settled into being our collective vision of the "old pro," so accustomed to his gifts and his self-assurance that he barely notices them. It's a shame, though, to see him asked for nothing more or less than his twentieth straight-up serving of the Tommy Lee Jones house special since 1993; we're left only to imagine how great he would've been among Peckinpah's posse of dried-out saddle-tramps. Del Toro fares significantly worse, but, given only the barest scraps of scenes to conjure a character from (a broken wrist kept him off the set for months, which may at least partially explain his underwhelming, disjointed on-screen presence), he at least succeeds in creating something memorably weird. Looking good as ever with a wildman's pompadour atop his 2,000-pound brow and an oddly unfocused glitter in his raccoon eyes, he delivers his scarce lines with over-wrought James Dean-ish mellifluousness and plenty of portentous gestures. Given a little more opportunity he might very well have edged out Jon Voight in Anaconda to snatch the coveted "Best Legitimate Actor Just Fucking Around In A Really Stupid Movie" statuette.

Our leads are eventually allowed at least one particularly good huffing-and-puffing judo duet, a breathless slapfight that's the best thing in the movie. But Nielsen's tagalong agent soon interjects between their butting paunches, downing del Toro with a decidedly honor-less, un-primal, and perfectly effeminate tranquilizer dart. It's not the last time this unusual primal scene will occur, where the precise, businesslike woman interrupts and spoils their Neanderthal masculine face-offs, and it's not difficult to sense that Friedkin is up to something with these recurrent incidents of fightus interruptus. It is difficult, however, to care. The Hunted is rife with this kind of stillborn thematic mcguffin from the word go. When the disembodied rumble of Johnny Cash ushers in the movie with a line from Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited": "God says to Abraham, 'Kill me a son,'" after which we helicopter-dive into the fire-and-brimstone, we're set up for an epic, biblical trial of faith and an examination of paternal and religious bonds. What we get is a hopped-up, jostly grudge match between a two guys who were in the same pathological scout troop.

There's something really disconcerting about the way Friedkin guiltily slips these and other big, solemn, lumpy ideas into his squalid slasher; he feels he needs them to justify his brutality. The Hunted is clearly a movie that couldn't give a shit about combat fatigue (watch John Huston's Let There Be Light; the truth of it isn't the stuff of which deadly cat-and-mouse games are made), paternal relationships (or any human relationships, for that matter), systematic slaughter, or back-room political skullduggery. The critic Manny Farber, writing on the physicality and contrarian artless artfulness that made the best American action movies, praised those directors who "accepted the role of hack so that they can involve themselves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types of action." But pretentious Francophile Friedkin, who has been photographed wearing a pretty embarrassing cravat, can never seem to rescind his false image of himself as an artiste long enough to become that really good hack he should be. The Hunted's true art brut passion obviously lies in swinging spiked logs from trees and in Benicio del Toro chucking a handful of blood in Tommy Lee Jones's face; everything else is executed with all the vigor of a last-minute homework assignment.

For all the dribbled, worshipful enviro-mysticism let slip by its primaries, The Hunted gets remarkably little pictorial or emotional effect from the outsized, manic-depressive vistas of the Pacific Northwest. Regardless of whether Del Toro and Jones are careening through downtown Portland or surfing along on whitewater rapids, the pacing, muddy green-gray palette, and "edgy" over-active camerawork remain the same. The idea, I suppose, is to leave no aesthetic delineation between jungle and urban jungle, thus sympathizing with del Toro's decomposed moral boundaries, an equation which is none-to-subtly drawn out when Jones, looking out the window at a perfectly nondescript city block, deadpans: "It's a wilderness." The result, however, is an astonishingly saggy, rhythm-less piece of work with no sense of space or locale.

All said, I imagine The Hunted will probably perform well among antisocial pony-tailed Tae-kwon-do enthusiasts who obsessively re-read Gary Paulsen's Hatchet and are prone to wearing black Nature Company tee shirts with timberwolves on them (You know who I'm talking about. You went to High School with him). For the rest of us, however, it's interesting to note that another filmmaker who left his indelible mark on 1970's Hollywood has recently produced a film from the same raw materials, genocide and survivalism, that Friedkin plugs into his clunky thrill machine. Which only perhaps proves the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same: Polanski can hit the grace notes, while Friedkin still only bangs away off-key.
- NICK PINKERTON