The Hunted

Year 13, Day 81 - 3/22/21 - Movie #3,784

BEFORE: John Finn carries over from "Finding Steve McQueen", and I can't say for sure if this film has been on my list the longest - probably not because I think that honor goes to the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", then some time-travel movies, but I've probably been trying to get to this one for at least two years, maybe three.  Some films just defiantly refuse to be linked to, then a couple new films come along, and sometimes then it's very easy.  Go figure, with a film from 2019 on one side and an even newer film from 2020 coming up tomorrow, that's somehow the magic formula for crossing this one off.  It's too weird to even be random, there's just some weird alchemical science to this linking thing.

This doesn't really feel like a very female-centric film, but it's still Women's History Month, so here goes - on March 22, Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony due to religious dissent.  On March 22, 1997, Tara Lipinski became the youngest female World Figure Skating Champion. It's the birthday of Katherine Jones, early British scientist (born in 1615), Caroline Norton, English feminist and social reformer (born in 1808), British painter Dorothy Tennant (born in 1855), American choreographer Ruth Page (born in 1899), Dutch physician and politician Els Borst (born in 1932) and Soviet test pilot Galina Korchuganova (born in 1935).  Also, Happy Birthday to Lena Olin, Reese Witherspoon, and Stephanie Mills.

THE PLOT: An FBI deep-woods tracker attempts to capture a trained assassin who has made a sport of hunting humans. 

AFTER: Well, I guess it's FBI week, at least so far - three films in a row with FBI agents in them, before this there was "The Last Stand" and "Finding Steve McQueen".  Complete coincidence, except that there's really no such thing. This film has FBI agents, but it's missing a few other things, like plot twists and character development. It's really the most simple story, there's a guy out in the woods hunting hunters, and then it takes another type of hunter to hunt HIM, so I guess that makes him a hunter-hunting hunter hunter. Right? Yes, this is where I find myself tonight.  

Somehow I knew that this film was shot in Oregon, I remember years ago I was working for an animation rep and one of our main clients was a big animation company based in Portland - they did those famous California Raisins commercials and then they sort of changed over from stop-motion to also animating with CGI, and we had a hand in landing them the big m&m's account, which was based out of a NYC ad agency.  Now that company is more famous for movies like "Coraline", "The Corpse Bride", "The Boxtrolls" and "Missing Link", which are all stop-motion. (Actually, the company sort of split into two divisions, one to make commercials and the other to make features, it's complicated.)  Anyway, I remember people from that animation company talking about a big Hollywood movie that came to Portland to shoot, and that movie was "The Hunted".  Years went by and I may have passed on several opportunities to watch it, finally in 2017 or so I said, "Why not?" and copied it to DVD, put it on my list.  It still took me another three years to get around to watching it, though.  

After all that, I just wish the movie had been better, because it really wasn't worth the wait.  The motivation for this ex-soldier becoming a killing machine is just that he went through some terrible wartime experiences in Kosovo, which really did a number on him.  You know, you hear so much about PTSD in our troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, but you almost never hear about the soldiers who have PTSD from Kosovo - it's America's truly forgotten war, I guess.  That's probably because the U.S. wasn't involved in that war, except as a member of NATO.  U.S. casualties were just 2, plus we lost a total of 2 aircraft.  Then we were fighting in Iraq after 2001, so who even remembers Kosovo?  But as this film suggests, maybe more went on in Kosovo than we thought, perhaps even the involvement of the CIA...

The other thing we're led to believe here is that once a man is trained to kill, it's going to become second nature to him, and in fact it may be hard for him to turn OFF that killing nature. This seems like a rather debatable point, most likely.  There are plenty of soldiers who are asked to kill for their country, through close-quartered hand-to-hand techniques, who don't become dangerous to the general public.  Though clearly there are some vets who snap and shoot up their workplaces or public places, we'd like to believe that these are isolated incidents, and most vets manage to not do this. 

OK, I stand corrected, there is one real twist here, and that is that the hunter that gets sent into the woods to track the killer is also the guy who TRAINED the killer - he's an ex-serviceman who trained soldiers for hand-to-hand combat, though he's never killed anyone himself. But he's sort of semi-retired and working for the U.S. Wildlife Service in Oregon, or maybe he's deep undercover in a menial forest ranger job, it's a bit tough to tell.  The important thing is that he's an expert tracker and fighter, but so is the man he trained.  They'd seem to be evenly matched here, except for the fact that one of them has killed before, and the other one hasn't.  Advantage to the killer, I guess. 

But the rest is a really simple formula - good guy tracks bad guy, good guy fights bad guy, good guy wins.  Bad guy escapes, good guy tracks bad guy again, good guy fights bad guy again, good guy wins.  Movie over.  It's a lot like "The Fugitive" except this time we're rooting for Tommy Lee Jones and not the man he's tracking down, plus there are no other twists like finding out who murdered Dr. Kimble's wife and such.  (It should have been "Kimball", right?  That's a much more common last name...)

I liked a lot of the subtle camera work seen in some of the chase scenes shot in the city of Portland, especially when Hallam used all these tricks to evade capture, like staying still when you might think he would run, or throwing a coat over himself to look like a homeless man - mostly people want to treat the homeless as invisible, so it makes sense.  But then that would always be ruined by a shot of Hallam running away and being spotted, when if he were just to walk away calmly from that position, he might avoid being spotted each time.  The tracker's probably trained to scan a scene quickly for any fast movement or anything out of place.  During high school, if I had a couple of study hall periods at the end of the day and I wanted to leave early, I didn't sneak out by the back entrance near the gym, because that's where kids got caught. I walked out the front door, right by the office, and waved to the secretaries on the way out. Never got in trouble, not once.  Of course, I had a reputation as the type of kid who would never cut class, and that helped. 

But here's where the film fell apart for me - Hallam is on the run, he's escaped from custody and he knows that his mentor and the police are looking for him, so what does he do?  He spends a few HOURS out in the open, stoking a fire and using it to carve and shape a knife from scrap metal, hammering it like a blacksmith would. Wouldn't this create smoke and a lot of noise, and be very visible from, say, a helicopter?  Wouldn't a smarter move be to find a good hiding place at this point?  Nope, it's time for a very loud, visible knife-forging session.  The weird thing is, Bonham uses the same break-time to fashion stone weapons of his own, but why didn't he just get some from home, or from the police or other agents?  He had that opportunity?

There are a few other things that don't make sense here, lump them under various N.P.'s - like why did Agent Durrell call everybody back into the police office downtown just to tell some of agents how to search the river?  Why couldn't she have done that when they were all, you know, AT the river?  And if Hallam had to make his own knife, how did he also make his own bungee cord?  And how did he get those logs raised up in that Ewok-like booby-trap by himself?  Just wondering...

I'm just really disappointed after such a big build-up, so many years spent not watching this film, then finally getting to it - maybe all that was a bit too much, I created a heightened sense of anticipation that the movie just couldn't live up to.  Or maybe it's just disappointing to find yet another film that just isn't a "brick" in any way, it's just the mortar in between.

Also starring Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Company Men"), Benicio del Toro (last seen in the audience of a Stones concert in "Shine a Light"), Connie Nielsen (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Leslie Stefanson, José Zuniga (last seen in "Twilight"), Ron Canada (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Mark Pellegrino (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Jenna Boyd, Aaron DeCone, Carrick O'Quinn (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Lonny Chapman (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), Rex Linn (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Eddie Velez, Alexander MacKenzie and the voice of Johnny Cash. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 tranquilizer darts