The Hunt (2020)

[StevePulaski]

The Hunt (2020)
Directed by: Craig Zobel

Rating: ★★½

Seeing The Hunt with a lively crowd amidst the COVID-19 virus hitting America like a hurricane will definitely be a story I tell my (disinterested) future children. More on that when I wax nostalgic about the experience decades down the road in a blog post on a future platform that's yet to be created, or even brainstormed.

Arguably the best thing to happen to The Hunt was a whirlwind of controversy incited by President Donald Trump back in the summer of 2019 as the film's original September 27th release date approached. In August, Trump tweeted — something at which he is most consistent — that "Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate!" Although not calling out The Hunt by name, he made the target of his attack clear when he followed up by saying, "The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos."

Rest assured, America: if we can weather some of the crap Hollywood has spewed in recent decades, and the free-thinkers who witnessed something like Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas years back can still operate in this ever-growing hazy world, we'll certainly find other things to direct our anger towards than a silly, superfluous satire.

Creative works about hunting human beings for sport isn't new. We just had a politically tinged franchise, headlined by Jennifer Lawrence, predicated around the concept that spanned four films conclude less than four years ago. We, too, had Richard Connell's famous story The Most Dangerous Game, along with the Gary Busey B-movie Surviving the Game. Perhaps we haven't had a film like Craig Zobel's The Hunt just yet; a fiercely modern flick that — contrary to public perception — portrays the far left and far right as insufferable cads that can't exist without the other. Zobel's film distills the former down to elitist cucks who search high and low for the next microaggression by which to be triggered and the latter as racist redneck deplorables who grip their guns as tightly as they would a bench-press bar. Writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof seek no pleasure in choosing sides. They're simply having too much fun creating carnage, like a pesky internet troll at whom you can't help but laugh.

The film hits the ground running almost right away, with 12 strangers — Betty Gilpin, Ike Barinholtz, Emma Roberts, and outlaw country singer Sturgill Simpson, credited as "Vanilla Nice" and donning an oversized basketball jersey, to name a few faces — awaking in a field, gagged and confused. An enormous cargo-box holds an arsenal of weaponry, but many aren't fortunate enough to get out of the field alive. Those who last long enough realize they're part of "Manorgate," a (for now) fictional right-wing internet conspiracy claiming wealthy liberals are kidnapping conservatives and hunting them for sport. One of the savvy individuals is Crystal (Gilpin), who makes it out of the field and becomes the film's focal point as she navigates no man's land in hopes to find out who is hunting her.

The Hunt forms the personalities of all its characters out of the inflammatory rhetoric used to tear down extremists of both parties, with enough brutality to make it palatable. Nearly every soul is as contemptible as the next. If one of the victims isn't spouting off about their god-given right to carry a firearm, one of the female hunters is fussing over one of her male colleagues using the phrase "you guys" as a collective. Cuse and Lindelof's screenplay feels like it was taken straight from a South Park episode in which there are no good guys, both groups on either side of the argument come off as loons, and the budding drama stems from whether a crossbow, an assault rifle, or a knife will be used, and by whom, in the next act of cold-blooded murder.

By this point you should know if this is a film you'd like to see, given the current outrage climate and your desire to watch senseless carnage ensue before you. I took some morbid pleasure in watching The Hunt. It's not every day you get an inexplicably trashy, Grindhouse-style slice-and-dice flick in 2,000+ theaters around the country, and the light political charge made it all the more satisfying. Seeing familiar faces like Sturgill and Ethan Suplee playing broadly drawn caricatures and functioning in a whacked-out premise made me grin, but not as much as seeing Betty Gilpin completely crush her performance. She's a wily presence, accentuating a delightful southern twang allowing every line of dialog to crackle, no matter how banal. It's the kind of performance you hope will be revisited in coming years after Gilpin is a household name. In divisive times, I hope we can all agree on that.

The Hunt ultimately lacks as a social satire due to the limitations of how far it wants to take its message. Once more, like a contemporary episode of South Park, it's here for a good time, not a long time, with its lasting impact as a midnight movie amongst friends kept warm by a chilled case of beer and copious munchies. I can appreciate that direction, even if by doing so, it proves the work is little more than momentarily compelling as opposed to memorable when it comes time to find a meaning.

NOTE: Take a listen to my review of The Hunt on my podcast "Stove's Movie Minute:" www.walls102.com/episode/stoves-movie-minute-the-hunt-2020/

Starring: Betty Gilpin, Hillary Swank, Wayne Duvall, Ethan Suplee, Ike Barinholtz, Sturgill Simpson, Emma Roberts, and Justin Hartley. Directed by: Craig Zobel.