Path of Least Resistance
The Hunt is the umpteenth retelling of Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” ostensibly updated for the Trump era. This repurposing of Connell’s timeless tale would make for interesting, compelling storytelling…if it weren’t so base-level.
To get it out of the way, and acknowledging that “controversy” is in the eye of the beholder: The Hunt is neither shocking in its politics nor its violence (with painted-on-in-post blood spatter diluting the effect even further). Any thinking member on either “side” of the political aisle will see this as a film that’s scared shitless of offending anybody. Even when it attempts to subvert Left- and Right-wing stereotypes, it fails miserably.
In fact, it’s so staggeringly self-conscious that its one clear goal is a desire to be loved by all. Ewww.
If The Hunt is consistent in any regard, it’s how it takes the path of least resistance toward making any kind of satirical statement. Consider, for example, Death Race 2000 and Eating Raoul, which hold up extremely well because they push the boundaries of absurdity, but ground the over-the-top elements in genuine human fears (getting killed on the open road; taking desperate measures to pay the bills). These films spit in the eye of social mores, rejecting complacent “entertainment” as they peel back the hypocrisy and xenophobia bubbling beneath the surface. As a result, they offer the same catharsis as good horror, whether we acknowledge it while watching, or only consider it after the fact. Either way, the art has done its job.
Weightless Exertions
The Hunt washes its hands of any thematic or intellectual heavy lifting, coasting instead on its unearned reputation. Screenwriters Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (Prometheus) think they’re being clever when they “mock” both sides, when in reality all they’re doing is flinging a goody bag of empty buzzwords at the screen (take a drink every time you hear “snowflake,” “crisis actor,” “deplorable,” “victim blaming,” or “problematic”; take a double shot whenever someone invokes a real-life figure, like Hannity, Orwell, or Nixon). It’s another weightless exertion in a script that took two people to write. Even in the early going, when the film still has a degree of unpredictability working in its favor, the dialog exchanges are painfully on-the-nose.
One thing The Hunt almost gets right is economy. At 90 minutes, it’s consistent with the wind-up rush the best films of this type can deliver. But director Craig Zobel’s (Compliance) sense of style and staging is as hollow and anonymous as the worst Blumhouse efforts. And the slick, overproduced look of the whole thing renders the “strong bloody violence” generally ineffective. A sinking feeling settled in early on, when one character fell into a pit of spikes, was pulled out by another, and proceeded to be blown in half by a landmine and flung back into the pit. The character’s utter disaffection, played for laughs, falls flat (hey, maybe it’s some “millennial” thing, amirite? [takes shot]).
Similarly, a one-on-one fight between two characters late in the film is all empty camera tricks and classical-music scoring for ironic value. You may ask yourself why it doesn’t resonate like it should, but I’d resigned myself to that inevitability long before I got there.
Real Fearless Filmmaking
The film knows how to get your attention right out the gate: before the 15-minute mark, there’s not one, but several “Marion Crane” deaths. You think, for a little bit, that there might be some kind of purpose driving this thing. But when the plot settles in, stumbling from one desperate narrative checkpoint to another with little momentum and even less tension, you realize that that particular gimmick was probably influenced by how many days they could afford to have certain actors on-set.
So, perhaps the only thing The Hunt genuinely gets right is its protagonist: Snowball (Betty Gilpin) is a hard-bitten, soft-spoken character as smart and savvy as the screenwriters will allow (but easily smarter than the screenwriters in a better-written film). Perhaps the one subtextual comment the film makes is that her weathered manner is allof us right now, regardless of race, creed, or political affiliation: exhausted by the news (whether fake or real; and who knows anymore, besides?), despondent over quarantine/unemployment, and reliant only on our “selves” (in the most individualistic sense) to navigate the upside-down world surrounding us. Even if that wasn’t the intent, it’s the one thing I can believe about this film. Gilpin was also wonderful (in a completely different kind of performance) in this year’s The Grudge; looking forward to seeing more of her in the future.
More than once, I wondered how S. Craig Zahler (Dragged Across Concrete) would’ve approached this material, as his films force the audience to ask questions and answer for their own complicity in viewing. On a purely existential level, that’s the kind of fearless filmmaking that scares meshitless. The intention of something like Concrete isn’t to be loved; it’s simply to exist. The Hunt, meanwhile, is scared shitless of any notions of moral or political ambiguity, or the sense that it’s anything more than a lazy crowd-pleaser…but it doesn’t even get that right.
1 out of 5 stars
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Crash Analysis Support Team
Jonny Numb
Jonny Numb (aka Jonathan Weidler) has been in hibernation since the first goddamn week of winter, but still co-hosts The Last Knock horror podcast with Billy Crash. His writing can also be found at 1428 Elm.
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(The Hunt movie still from Blumhouse.)