The Hunt misses its mark
Controversial new film The Hunt isn’t as smart as it pretends to be
There’s a scene in The Hunt where Betty Gilpin’s character, whom I wouldn’t bet against in a fight with a Terminator, wonders whether she’s dealing with smart people pretending to be idiots, or idiots pretending to be smart.
I had the same issues while sitting (occasionally squirming uncomfortably) through The Hunt, a bloody, politically charged thriller written by Nick Cuse (TV’S Watchmen) and Damon Lindelof (TV’S Lost). Were these scribes and director Craig Zobel cleverly skewering America’s class divides or just parroting them?
I’m going to come down on the side of — well, I don’t want to call any filmmaker who hasn’t made a Transformers movie an idiot, but let’s just say that The Hunt isn’t as smart as it would like to believe.
Filling your screenplay with modern touchstones and triggers — “deplorables,” “snowflakes,” “crisis actors” — and references to Animal Farm is not the same as constructing a reasoned appraisal of modern culture.
It can court controversy, though. The Hunt, originally set to open last September, was delayed in the wake of two mass shootings, and some truly Churchillian
verbiage from the U.S. president, who tweeted: “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate!”
The film is based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, though only in the way that Twinkies are based on human nutritional requirements. In the original, a madman on a private island hunts anyone unlucky enough to be shipwrecked there.
Compare that to The Hunt, in which a rag-tag collective of apparently middle-class Americans have been drugged, transported to a compound in Arkansas, given a box of weapons (shades of
The Hunger Games) and then used as target practice.
Many of them don’t last long enough to even have proper names — the credits list characters like Staten Island, Yoga Pants and the dead giveaway Target. But Crystal (Gilpin) is made of stronger stuff, and eventually joins forces with Don (Wayne Duvall) as she tries to figure out how to survive. Meeting and defeating queen bee Athena (Hilary Swank) seems like it’ll be a necessary step.
The movie delights in upsetting audience expectation — it’s even possible I’ve lied in this review, so as not to spoil things — but it’s worth noting that this isn’t a movie about liberals hunting Trump supporters. Or, to the extent that it is, the liberals are not the good guys.
Crystal, with her rural Mississippi accent, seems like real red-state material, but we’re definitely expected to side with her against the hunters, with their private jets, high-tech toys and love of NPR. Whether you root for the level of violence inflicted by one character upon another is a different matter; The Hunt is not for the squeamish. But credit to the filmmakers for staging a protracted fight in a kitchen and refraining from using the ol’ frying-pan-as-weapon cliché. They even leave a bottle of champagne unbroken!
So also not as dumb as it could be. Though I wish it had taken a few more chances with the notion, flirted with but never fully developed, that conspiracy theorists bring about their own conspiracies. The trouble with a film that portrays class warfare writ large is that the nuances get lost amid that big picture.