
Kino Lorber
The Hunted has an incredible pedigree: William Friedkin was, with the exception of Michael Mann, the most accomplished director of procedural thrillers in American film.
Tommy Lee Jones playing an emotionally conflicted specialist chasing a murderer against his better judgment and Benecio del Toro as a sympathetic villain who has been destroyed by vast societal forces and is lashing out.
The cinematography and editing are first-rate, the attention to procedural detail is everything you would expect, and even the hand to hand fighting sequences (choreographed by Philippine Special Forces) are uniquely thrilling for an American film.
So why am I left so cold by the final result?
The Hunted follows Special Forces veteran, Silver Star recipient, and black ops operator Aaron Hallam (del Toro) whose sanity has begun to crack after a particularly violent assassination mission in Kosovo. Hallam is living off the grid in deep Oregon forest when he becomes convinced that two men with high powered rifles aren’t hunting deer, but sweeping for him and he butchers them.
Portland FBI contacts L.T. Bonham (Jones) a tracker and private contractor who teaches survival and knife skills to Special Forces and he instantly identifies the killer as a former student. The situation seems disarmed when he tracks Hallam back to his camp and brings him in without loss of life, but Army Intelligence strong-arms the FBI into taking Hallam into custody, and when Hallam realizes he’s to be summarily executed to minimize exposure, he kills his handlers and escapes again. Bonham is drawn back into chasing a man who he refused to help when he could, and he knows he must kill to stop.
The Hunted doesn’t just have a great pedigree, it has the bones of a great thriller script as well.
All of the time spent exploring Bonham’s survivalist and tracker skill set is fascinating, and Tommy Lee Jones gives as detailed and authoritative a performance as you might expect while still keeping this character distinct and unique from his work in films like The Fugitive. Benecio del Toro is every bit his equal, finding a means of conveying PTSD that doesn’t feel like a cultural cliche and arriving at the tragic heart of a man who cannot turn off the lethal mentality that has served him so well for so long.
Unfortunately The Hunted feels like a film with pieces cut out of it: badly paced, underwritten, and oddly cheap for a film with so much talent behind it.
The theme of the film is Bonham’s guilt over his training playing a role in the destruction of Hallam and his own desire to put the past behind him inadvertently causing him to ignore the man’s letters where he asked for help. There’s also a deep irony at play that while Bonham instructed men to kill with optimum efficiency, he himself never has killed– so he doesn’t really know what he would do if he had to undergo Hallam’s experiences.
All of that we have to infer on the fly, because the film doesn’t take enough time to stop and consider itself. As a result, stories like Hallam returning to a woman and child who he lived with at some point in his past don’t feel earned, they just feel like they’re taking up running time. The opening scene in Kosovo and the first encounter between Jones and del Toro have tons of life to them, but after that all the action feels rushed, perfunctory, because none of the story beats really have the space to breathe from a script that needed another draft to give texture and time between what needs to happen. Friedkin, for his part, seems to lose interest in the second act and none of the director’s powerful realism shows through in the final act– it’s as if the film was taken away from him in the editing booth halfway through completion.
Extras include commentary, featurettes, deleted scenes, and trailer.
Not recommended.


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