BEFORE: I'm not all that sure about this one, it doesn't really scream "Halloween" movie, but it's part of a trend in the last two years - if you can call two movies on the same theme a trend - about people hunting people. The other film is called "Ready or Not" and was released in 2019, a year earlier than this one, but both movies popped up in my cable listings, and I tend to notice that sort of thing, two different movies on the same topic. When I was making my links for the Halloween chain I realized it could fill a slot, and I thought, "Well, I've got movies this year about people stalking people, I've got movies this year about people killing people for no reason, maybe a film about people hunting people would fit right in." I guess we'll find out - but there's no obvious link to "Ready or Not" so I'll have to save that for another time.
(Actually, that's not true - there was a link from "Scream 4" to "Ready or Not", and it was Adam Brody, but then I had nowhere to go after that. Actually, that's not true either, I could have gone to "Jennifer's Body" and from there to "Black Christmas" or "A Nightmare on Elm Street", but then I'd be finishing up with a different set of horror films, and then I wouldn't get to THIS one.)
Hilary Swank carries over from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
THE PLOT: Twelve strangers wake up in a clearing. They don't know where they are, or how they got there. They don't know they've been chosen for a very specific purpose - The Hunt.
AFTER: I've seen other films on this topic, "Ten Little Indians" leaps to mind first, of course. There's always somebody who thinks that the most dangerous game of all for man to hunt would logically be other people, right? Yeah, I'm still thinking that polar bears or tigers would be a lot more dangerous to hunt, even if they don't think like humans do. Google's now suggesting a bunch of movies to me that I've never heard of, like "Surviving the Game", "Beyond the Reach", "Race with the Devil" and so on. Yeah, thanks, maybe later.
But since this movie is very politically charged, it kind of reminds me of "The Handmaid's Tale", in that some writer back in the 1980's looked around at the political scene, the Moral Majority and the anti-abortionists, and projected all that rhetoric into the future, thinking about what a couple of decades of stamping out women's reproductive rights might cause someday. Here some writer looked around at the deep, DEEP divide between liberals and conservatives here in the U.S., and come on, we all KNOW there are people out there stockpiling weapons, living in the woods, and training for the zombie-pocalypse, or perhaps the liberal-pocalypse. To them the COVID vaccine is the seventh seal, the final sign that either God or Trump is coming back to rule the world and throw the heathens into the fiery pit of doom. Or something like that.
Honest to God, as soon as I finished this movie I switched over to MSNBC, which I usually watch for a few hours while composing my daily limerick (yeah, I know...it was a pandemic coping mechanism) and playing some phone games in order to make myself tired. And on MSNBC I saw a real American at a conservative rally out in Idaho, asking with complete sincerity, "We're living in the age of medical fascism, but how many more elections are we going to let them steal? When do we bring the guns out?" I don't know about you, but guys like this scare the crap out of me - he clearly lives on a diet of MRE's and misinformation, he's got his bomb shelter filled with crackers and beans and he's just waiting for the Proud Boys to tell him to show up with guns and ammo to "take our country back". Not all the nutcases showed up on January 6, there simply have to be more pockets of them out there, and that's certainly cause for concern.
But hold on a minute, this movie isn't exactly what you might think. Yes, there ARE people in this country who are ready RIGHT NOW to kill the other fellow Americans who they disagree with, or perhaps it's the ones who disagree with them. (Some just for mask mandates and vaccine mandates, but that's ridiculous, these are things meant to keep EVERYONE safe, including the people who think they're not needed. ESPECIALLY the people who think they're not needed. But side issue, I digress.). So naturally you might think this film is about a bunch of gun-nuts killing the liberal snowflakes who want equal voting rights for everyone, free and legal abortions, raising the minimum wage and de-funding the police in favor of more social services.
BUT you would be wrong. This film is REALLY about a liberal elite class who are ALSO a bunch of gun-nuts, who have kidnapped a bunch of high-profile, outspoken conservatives (aka "deplorables") and are ready to hunt THEM down. See, they flipped the script! But this somehow simultaneously makes this film both a little more interesting and also absolutely improbable. Liberals hunting conservatives? We all know the other way around is probably more likely to happen, so was this just done as a fluke? Or is the film targeting viewers in the heartland, the Red States, the breadbasket of America? If so, I may have a real problem with that. Also, did they flip a coin to see who would be hunting whom? Or did they try the script the other way and it just didn't work? Now I'm curious.
Well, you got my attention, "The Hunt". Sure, I'm intrigued, but I'm also a bit pissed off, because you're portraying people who think more like I do as the "bad" guys and I think you're trying to get me to root for the underdog, who are all different flavors of redneck conservatives. Now maybe I don't want to see ANYBODY hunted like animals, but I suppose if I had to choose.... No, no, you're not going to lead my mind down that rabbit hole. No hunting people, and for that matter, I'm not even really in favor of people hunting animals. You know they sell meat in the grocery store, right? The only P.E.T.A. organization I'd support is "People Eating Tasty Animals", but honestly I'm just too lazy to hunt and kill my own food.
And, to be fair, the hunters here are somewhat fair - they actually provide weapons to their prey. BUT, they also start taking sniper shots at them before their prey can fire back. Cowardly liberals, shooting those conservatives from the safety of their bunkers. Did they REALLY give the hunted people a fair chance, or come on, was that all for show? Now I don't know WHICH side to root for here, the sneaky sniper-rifle wielding liberals or the plucky panicky conservatives running for the hills. I guess it's a toss-up if you frame it like that.
There's apparently some controversy that was stirred up by this film - Gee, ya THINK? - but I'm not going to read up on that until I finish my review, just to be fair. The poster makes the bold claim that apparently nobody talking about the film has actually SEEN it, and I'm not sure how that particular situation comes about. I certainly wouldn't talk much about a film I haven't seen, and then I don't end up talking too much about most films that I DO see. (EDIT: they said that nobody saw this movie because it got rescheduled once because of a mass shooting in the news, and a second time because of the pandemic theater shutdown.)
But I think even more interesting than the whole liberal/conservative face-off here is the riff on the whole Q-Anon conspiracy thing, where "liberal CEOs hunting people" is kind of equivalent to "politicians and Hollywood celebrities are drinking baby's blood in DC pizza parlors". Is it TRUE, or is it just a rumor that somebody said, somebody else repeated and the whole thing just got out of hand.
That being said, a LOT of people still go missing every year, and I don't think we as a society have gotten even close to figuring out where they all go. Nobody will ever know for sure until they find themselves tied up in the back of a van, and then of course, it's too late - you're about to find out what happens to the missing people, but you're probably not going to like the answer.
As for the movie, I'm going to give this one the benefit of the doubt, because it's got a lot of stuff I haven't seen before, but then, on the other hand, a lot of that stuff is just new ways to kill other people, and that doesn't go TOO far by my measuring system.
Also starring Betty Gilpin (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Ike Barinholtz (last seen in "Late Night"), Ethan Suplee (last seen in "The Trust"), Emma Roberts (last seen in "Scream 4"), Wayne Duvall (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), J.C. MacKenzie (ditto), Chris Berry (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Sturgill Simpson (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Kate Nowlin (last seen in "Young Adult"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Reed Birney (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Sylvia Grace Crim (ditto), Glenn Howerton (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Justin Hartley, Steve Coulter (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Teri Wyble (ditto), Tadasay Young (ditto), Dean West (last seen in "When We First Met"), Vince Pisani (last seen in "Irresistible"), Jason Kirkpatrick (ditto), Steve Mokate, Macon Blair (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Hannah Aline, Jim Klock (last seen in "Project Power"), Usman Ally, Walker Babington (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven" (2016), Ariel Eliaz, Alexander Babara (last seen in "Triple 9")
RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of Heidsieck champagne recovered from a shipwreck
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