William Friedkin, the great director of
”
The French Connection
”
and
”
The Exorcist,
”
has recently hit a dry spell with films like
”
Jade
”
and
”
The Rules of Engagement,
”
and both films did little to help us remember Friedkin at his
peak of creativity in the ’70s.
William Friedkin, the great director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” has recently hit a dry spell with films like “Jade” and “The Rules of Engagement,” and both films did little to help us remember Friedkin at his peak of creativity in the ’70s.
His new film, the virtually plotless and anemic “The Hunted,” plays like a bad “Rambo” retread, where a brainwashed war hero can’t turn off his need to kill.
The film gets off to a wierd start by having one of our heroes, named Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), wandering around an Oregon forest. He hears and then spots a wolf with its leg in a trap. Upon letting the wolf go, he seems to boil with anger and heads to a town watering hole to figure out who set the trap. After one of the customers fesses up, Hallam takes out his frustrations by smashing the culprit’s head against the bar.
After heading back to the woods, Hallam sees a couple of deer hunters tracking an animal. He proceeds to trick them and ambushes them, gutting them with a massive army combat knife. Silent, invisible and without remorse, Hallam’s killing has caught the attention of L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), the tracker-trainer who taught Hallam how to kill commando-style. Bonham knows what Hallam is capable of, and heads off to try to capture the ex-soldier, using the same skills he taught his student.
The movie gets more and more predictable as it moves along, with Hallam, who was initially trained as a military assassin for missions in Kosovo, continuing his killing in the forests around Portland, with hunters as his victims. In addition to Bonham, who is tracking his pupil without weapons, it seems the whole law enforcement world is after Hallam.
He gets caught many times in the film only to wriggle his way out of every situation. Unfortunately, the screenplay doesn’t do much with regard to the intelligence of the authorities trying to catch the fugitive, as they make every conceivable mistake, allowing him to escape continually throughout the film.
My favorite escape is the one where Hallam, who has just been captured by the FBI, is handcuffed in the front, only to use some fancy combat skills to chop and sock his way out of there. In an unusual irony, the audience seemed to be rooting for Hallam and not for Bonham, the authority figure trying to catch him.
The animal-rights slant to the story, though noble, seems strangely out of place here as well. How did Hallam get so concerned about wildlife and why are the majority of his victims hunters? Why does he get such a thrill out of killing? Has he justified his actions through his military training, just moving on to the next enemy, the position the hunters find themselves in?
It’s a bumpy philosophical ride, and I don’t think the subtext belongs in a film as simple-minded as “The Hunted.” In one scene, he talks of U.S. corporations killing six billion chickens a year, just to satiate the appetites of fat Americans, as if that would justify his rationale for keeping the spree going. I don’t buy the idea that Hallam has gone mad from military shock; he can’t turn the killing off because he simply doesn’t want to.
“The Hunted” does have its moments, considering the enormous appeal of Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, but it ultimately fails to say anything specific about how special forces trained fighters turn off the military mindset when they change back into civilians. If the film would have gone that route, we may have had more than just a by-the-book, standard action thriller.
THE HUNTED. Directed by William Friedkin. Screenplay by Art Monterastelli. With Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nelson, Jenna Boyd and Leslie Stefanson. Rated R (violence and language), 95 minutes. Now playing at Bay Area theaters.
