The Hunted

Director: William Friedkin
Screenplay: David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli
Stars: Tommy Lee Jones (L.T. Bonham), Benicio Del Toro (Aaron Hallam), Connie Nielsen (Abby Durrell), Jenna Boyd (Loretta Kravitz), Leslie Stefanson (Irene Kravitz)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2003
Country: USA
The Hunted

For many years now, but particularly since the gravity-defying theatrics of The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), most representations of violence in big-budget Hollywood movies have been defined more by their balletic beauty than by their gritty realism. Slow motion and rapid editing have been de rigueur since Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), but it seem now that they are the only way to represent action, particularly with the growing influence of Hong Kong cinema over the last decade.

William Friedkin’s The Hunted is a throwback then, a gritty, grimy, lean-and-mean chase film that pits two men against each and lets them go at it for 90 minutes. It’s a film about killing, about the myriad ways one human being can end another’s life with a few quick flicks of a serrated blade. In the universe depicted here, real killing is what you do when you’re close enough to feel your victim’s breath on your face; guns are the easy way out, allowing you to end a life while keeping a comfortable distance. The film doesn’t quite romanticize violence or the men who are so adept at inflicting it on others, but it is clearly fascinated by the human capacity to unleash such fury.

The story opens in Kosovo in 1999, where Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), a specially trained covert soldier, must wind his way through an Albanian village being leveled by vicious Serbian soldiers in order to kill their general. This opening sequence is loud, violent, and imminently disturbing, as we witness along with Aaron scores of innocent people lined up and machine-gunned like cattle to the slaughter (the only misstep in this entire sequence is the cloying cliché of the little orphaned girl staring at the body of her dead mother). Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (Anna and the King) paints the horrifying images in inky blacks and flaming reds, portraying it as an almost surrealistic nightmare, too vicious to be true.

A nightmare is exactly what it becomes for Hallam, who is so battle stressed by his experiences that he literally loses his mind. He returns to the States after receiving a Silver Star and promptly begins stalking and slaughtering big-game hunters in the northeast. The exact reasons for these actions are never made entirely clear, but Hallam appears to have connected the slaughter of the Albanians to the slaughter of animals, thus taking it upon himself to become an animal-rights avenger who does to hunters what they do to deer and the like—namely, killing, gutting, and quartering them.

The police call in L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), an expert tracker living in British Columbia, to help them find this new serial killer. Bonham gives the standard “I don’t do that work anymore” resistance, but soon he’s slithering through the muddy forests of Oregon, tracking down Hallam who, we later find out, was one of his protégés. Although never officially in the military, Bonham was responsible for training dozens of elite soldiers in the fine arts of tracking and killing. A flashback sequence depicting one of his lessons in sneaking up behind someone and cutting him at least five times from thigh to neck in about two seconds is utterly chilling because Jones never lets us doubt its veracity for a second.

Most of the film’s narrative is given over to the various cat-and-mouse chases as Hallam, the soldier-son-gone mad, attempts to escape from Bonham, his surrogate father-figure. Hallam is captured once, but escapes, and after several finely wrought chases through various forests and the streets of Portland, Oregon (the film was directed, after all, by the man who literally defined the limits of the cinematic chase sequence in 1971’s The French Connection and 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A.), they find themselves face-to-face at the edge of a cliff, each man wielding a homemade knife and knowing that one of them will not emerge alive.

The resulting knife fight between them is one of the most exhilarating and frightening depictions of violence recently committed to film. Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, two steely actors with enough heavy-lined character in their faces for a dozen men, both bring a sense of heavy physicality to the action, and Friedkin never shies away from the gory results of a blade cutting through human flesh. There is nothing beautiful about any of it, yet it’s utterly captivating in a base, animalistic sense. Friedkin keeps the camerawork relatively simple, never trying to dress up the action with overdone style; instead, he allows the intensity of the fight to build of its own accord.

Unfortunately, The Hunted has numerous narrative weaknesses that hamper it at times. Screenwriters David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli clearly did not want to tell the story in the standard Hollywood fashion, which is why the narrative is defined primarily by ellipses and delayed information. However, despite the unconventional nature of the way the story is told, there are too many shoehorned Hollywood elements, particularly the character of Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), an FBI agent who is given far more screen time and attention than is needed.

The Hunted is, after all, the story of two men—a father and a son, for all intents and purposes, one of whom must die—and it should have stuck more closely to that primal design. By tacking on too many secondary characters (including an ex-girlfriend of Hallam’s), it only detracts from the main point of interest, which is the struggle. When the focus is where it should be, The Hunted is one of the most engrossing films to released so far this year.

Copyright © 2003 James Kendrick



Overall Rating: (3)




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