The Hunted (2003)

Tommy Lee Jones saves a wild wolf from a snare and the wolf does not even snap at him. I let that go. The movie jumps from Tommy Lee Jones in snow covered British Columbia to him vomiting from a helicopter ride in a now full on summer (maybe early fall) in Oregon just an eight hour drive from his BC home. Maybe that is possible. I have never been to either place. I let that go. The last leg of the movie begins with an A-Team sequence in which both antagonist and protagonist construct their own knives. Maybe a stone knife could be made in short order, but a forged metal blade, really? Oh, the antagonist also made deadly hair trigger traps from logs, paracord, and vines (???) while you weren't looking, because forging a knife takes so little time and energy that he killed some time waiting for TLJ to chip his knife. I could not let these things slide. I can put aside my disbelief for drawn out fights and an older man running and jumping far past the point of heart attack, but not the A-Team in a serious movie. The Hunted was entertaining and maybe even a 7/10 until it plummeted over the ludicrous A-Team waterfall.

Aaron Hallam (Del Toro) is a Kosovo veteran and also an unstoppable killing machine. When the mentally unstable Hallam returns home to Oregon, he continues his killing spree. This grabs the attention of FBI Special Agent Abby Durrell (Nielsen), who wants to stop him. As it turns out, this particular unhinged maniac was trained by a survival expert and knife maestro named L.T. Bonham (Jones). He's not lieutenant Bonham, he's L.T. Bonham, as he does point out he never was actually in the military, he just used his expertise to train the recruits. Feeling guilty that his star student is now on the rampage, Bonham comes out of retirement to do one last track, which inevitably leads into the final teacher-versus-student knife fight...but who really is THE HUNTED? Maybe we'll all find out together...It's First Blood (1982) meets The Fugitive (1993) meets White Ghost (1988) as Tommy Lee Jones puts on his grizzled hat once again. This was towards the beginning of what came to be known as the GeriAction trend in Hollywood, where an older generation of actors - within a certain range, mind you - wanted to try a few last punches and kicks before they kicked off this mortal coil. Everyone from Clint Eastwood to Liam Neeson to Sean Penn have tried it lately with varying degrees of success. As anyone who reads this site knows, we almost always root for the older guys. We hate young punks and we cheer when they lose. All that being said, I think it's fair to expect more of the great director William Friedkin than what we get here. It's all so simple, paint-by-numbers, one-dimensional even. Some guy is on the loose and Tommy Lee Jones is "Hunting" him. Is it wrong to want just a bit more meat on the bone than that? It feels like you've seen a lot of this before - just the images of Tommy Lee Jones in front of a waterfall will remind you of the aforementioned Fugitive. And a former military man with a knife that the authorities are chasing in the Pacific Northwest wilderness should bring to mind a certain Stallone movie series that we all know and love. They had enough time for the clichés we've all seen before, but somehow they couldn't find the time for some character development or human drama. They even fell back on the tired "Vietnam vet goes crazy" scenario, which could certainly be argued is insensitive, if not insulting. But we may not have noticed if that hadn't been done so many times before. The only difference is now it's Kosovo, not Vietnam. We would think that by 2003 Hollywood would have used up every last drop of that trope, but no, apparently not.This is one time that we can think of that we can't necessarily sign off on approving an 88-minute running time, like we usually do. Evidently there was more character development left on the cutting room floor. While we appreciate the sentiment to try to make the movie lean and mean, a couple more dialogue scenes that might have fleshed out the characters or explained their motivations would have gone a long way. It would have helped the audience care more about the Bonham-Hallam relationship, which would have increased the suspense. The filmmakers also seemed ambivalent about Connie Nielsen's character - they should have given her more screen time or axed her altogether. As it stands, she's just kinda there. We would have opted for more Nielsen, as her run on Law & Order: SVU were some of the best episodes of that series to date. The Hunted could have used a tough female, Dani Beck-like character.Looking at the movie a mere twelve years later (TWELVE years have passed since this came out? Maybe it's not so mere after all), it's hard to believe it got a theater release. If this was released today it would go DTV or on-demand, almost certainly. While it does contain the appropriate amount of action and violence - we even get some classic Tommy Lee Jones-Fu, or, to be more accurate, a Filipino fighting style called Sayoc Kali - it's hard to shake the feeling something is missing here. Perhaps we should hire L.T. Bonham to hunt it down...but then we'd be right back to where we started, wouldn't we?

Coming as it did from William Friedkin (THE FRENCH CONNECTION, THE EXORCIST, etc.), one couldn't help but have some pretty high expectations going into THE HUNTED; it wasn't long, however, before one was reminded that it was also Friedkin who gave us the inferior remake of THE WAGES OF FEAR (titled SORCEROR) and (we're told) much of the nasty Brando/Kilmer version of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. It seems somehow appropriate to revisit THE HUNTED at this point in History: there has been an average of one mass shooting a day in this country so far this year (a "mass shooting" being defined as a shooting in which four or more people are shot); even more shocking is THIS statistic: there has been an average of one shooting a day BY A TODDLER so far this year, as well. (With 300 Million guns owned by 312 Million people in this country, these stats aren't exactly surprising- although it IS surprising that Congress refuses to allow an investigation into the Cause(s) of such Rampant Violence...) The hand-to-hand combat scenes in THE HUNTED are short but sweet; otherwise, forget it.

William Friedkin's The Hunted has a simple enough concept, elevated by gorgeous cinematography among beautiful locations, solid work from its two leads, and a lean, mean aesthetic that slices all the unnecessary fat of its running time to deliver a sleek, brutal, very intimate cat and mouse thriller of visceral energy and a nice balance of machismo and feral, damaged vulnerability. In the mountainous woods of the Pacific Northwest, Washington/British Columbia area, an ex special ops soldier (Benicio Del Toro), suffering from PTSD, is slaughtering hunters like game, like a ghost among the trees. The powers that be enlist an ex military sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones), who happens to be the one who trained him, to find and stop him. In some hands this could have turned into a ridiculous, over the top bloodbath. But Friedkin's takes his time with these two, letting us see the unnerving way Del Toro comes unravelled, and the buried guilt and reluctant obligation that manifest in Jones. Del Toro is always just great in anything, period. The man just isn't capable of sub par work. Here he's a desperate, confused she'll of a human, bound by his misfiring synapses and corrupted soul into committing these heinous deeds, and you can see that caged animal in his eyes, a predator unbound from inhibition or the sanctioned order of protocol. He's lost it, and Del Toro understands that, giving us a measured, psychological take, instead of taking the easy way out and hamming it up like many actors would. Jones is a slow burn as he starts to realize what he's dealing with, and rises to the occasion magnificently. The film progresses into some purely exhilarating knife fight stand offs between the two, set against the raging waterfalls, lush mountainsides and unforgiving terrain of the North. The fights are just so well done. There's a breathless frenzy to the bloodletting, with sequences devoid of pointless stunt work or unnecessary fireworks, stripped away to these two warriors, with homemade stone shivs, battling at the most primal, personal level. These scenes hit hard, and above all are fun for any true fan of survival action.