Mark Reviews Movies: THE HUNT (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2020

Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof's screenplay for The Hunt lacks real political bite. This might sound like an odd statement. After all, the movie is about a group of liberal elites who hunt a group of right-wingers, seemingly for sport (as you likely have heard after its release was delayed, following some unsupported outrage from right-wing outlets, as well as the President hinting that his supporters might react violently—or openly calling for that violence, depending on one's interpretation—if it was released). There's a reason for this, and it has little to do with the left-right or Democrat-Republican divide in the country.

The politics here are mostly a smokescreen to cover up the story's major twist, which re-frames everything we assumed about the villains' motives. Since that's why all of the political content is in the movie, we have to wonder why it's here at all.

This isn't to suggest that Cuse, Lindelof, and director Craig Zobel should have avoided such material. Quite the contrary, it's to say that the filmmakers should possess the courage of their convictions. If they want to tell an inherently political tale, about a group from one side of the political divide hunting and killing people from the other, they should be able to do so. They should feel free to be as divisive, one-sided, down-the-middle, apathetic, or dismissive about the whole mess this country is in over the current state of politics. They should embrace their right to say whatever they want to say, in any way they're legally allowed to say it.

In other words, they should make that movie—whatever it is, whatever it says, however it wants to say those things. The problem, perhaps, is that they didn't make that movie. They instead made a pretty ordinary thriller, with a story at least as old as Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game," in which the politics are basically decoration—controversial and potentially inflammatory decoration, yes, but decoration nonetheless.

It begins so strongly, too. After a brief text conversation that apparently establishes the premise (A group of wealthy people joke about an internet video and then say they're looking forward to hunting some "deplorables" over the weekend), we're on board a private plane. A man, waking up from a drug-induced sleep, enters from the back of the plane, and a couple of the passengers kill him in a gruesome fashion. The camera moves from the dying man to a young woman, who later wakes up in the middle of a forest.

The introduction to the "game" repeatedly plays its own game with us. We note that the young woman is played by Emma Roberts, so, clearly, she's our protagonist. She isn't, though, and the movie makes that fact plainly clear a few minutes after she's introduced. Then, we're following a handsome and courageous guy, who risks his life for another of the hunted. His role as the de facto hero ends with a big bang, and on and on it goes, until all of the obvious heroes and most-recognizable faces are gone.

We're left with Crystal (Betty Gilpin), which sounds harsher than it's intended to be. She's an intriguing character—a military veteran from Mississippi who doesn't care about politics and flourishes under the constant pressure of people trying to kill her. On top of that, Gilpin plays her as an apathetic but hardened woman, with a glint of deadly mischief behind her eyes. The rest of the movie has her evading detection, outsmarting her hunters, and killing them with ruthless efficiency.

As for those politics, they're crammed in here, too, with about as much subtlety as the spurts of blood and devastated bodies that fill the movie's action sequences. At a roadside gas station, where a group of the hunted try to get help, the proprietors, who turn out to be hunters (and who later have a drawn-out debate about "politically correct" terminology), kill the survivors—but not before offering a one-liner for their final victim: "By the way, climate change is real." Gary (Ethan Suplee), who escaped the initial slaughter and tags along with Crystal for a bit, goes on a rant clumsily filled with internet lingo to describe the conspiracy theory—now, apparently, not too conspiratorial—that a bunch of liberals hunt people like them for fun.

To be fair, there is something of a message here—about how far people are willing to go to confirm their political biases, even if the facts are incorrect or the actions are wrong. It's exactly the sort of lesson we might expect from such a movie, which sees politics as ornamentation and doesn't seem to realize that its insistence that both sides are guilty is obliterated by the fact that only one side here is presented as sociopathic murderers.

The Hunt, then, feels like a movie that only cares about politics insofar as they'll prop up a pretty conventional, fairly generic story. It all leads up to a—dynamically choreographed and staged, for sure—one-on-one fight, which has nothing to say, but does speak volumes about the filmmakers' shallow intentions.

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