Thursday, March 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: The Hunted has too much Method for its B-movie madness

By Robert Chancey

In this age of neon idolatry, an Oscar statuette could be easily mistaken for the cross on Mount Cavalry. This might explain the reprehensible artistic choices made by former Oscar-winners William Friedkin (The French Connection), Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive) and Benicio Del Toro (Traffic) in The Hunted, a pestilent film of unimaginable savagery that manages to equate lone-wolf lunacy with martyrdom.

Written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths and Art Monteraselli, Friedkin's film is a muddled mess of pristine wilderness photography, B-movie histrionics and hackneyed themes of survival in the American frontier. (This film is so moronically eco-friendly that it recycles James Fenimore Cooper's 300-year-old clichés about man vs. nature and man vs. man while adding a few Hollywood truisms--commerce vs. art, narcissism vs. humility and idiocy vs. coherence.)

Jones plays L.T. Bonham, an unlikely amalgam of Captain Ahab and Johnny Appleseed--a nature-loving misanthrope who despises war but trains young men to become assassins for the U.S. military. After a series of murders in the Pacific Northwest, L.T. must pursue Aaron Hallam (Del Toro), his finest disciple and a focused killer of admirable tenacity. After an appalling stint in Kosovo, Aaron reinterpreted L.T.'s gospel to its logical extreme; spouting cryptic rhetoric about the food chain, he sounds like Ted Kaczynski brainwashed by PETA.

Pretending to be a psychological peek at the idealism and depravity of the male species, this illogical chase flick merely rehashes Rambo: First Blood, Vertigo, Never Cry Wolf and The Fugitive. Ironically, this anonymous blend of violence and hyperbole may be Friedkin's most personal film. This crude, senseless mayhem peeks right into the tortured psyche of this former wunderkind--a sanctimonious tyrant who believes he was crucified by Hollywood for his filmmaking sins.