"Jones
and Del Toro Shine but Hunted Ultimately Fails"
Once upon a
time, director William Friedkin was one of the most sought after
directors in Hollywood. Coming off back-to-back triumphs – and
two of the best films of their types ever made – The French
Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin was being
mentioned in the same breath as other great 70’s icons as
Coppola and Scorsese.
But that
potential never came to fruition. In fact, what’s most telling
about Friedkin’s career path over the last 20-odd years or so is
that his greatest critical and financial success since The
Exorcist was a 2001 re-release (with a few deleted scenes
added to no great effect) of his 1973 Oscar-winning horror
masterpiece. He’s had some bright moments; the car chase in
To Live and Die in L.A, the basketball game final of Blue
Chips, a remake of 12 Angry Men for Showtime; but all
and all Friedkin’s resume has been littered with far too many
clunkers like Cruising and Jade.
I’d like to
report that the aggressively streamlined thriller The Hunted
is a return to form for the director. Featuring two strong
central performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro
and some genuinely haunting moments, it certainly comes close.
In fact, The Hunted is Friedkin’s most successful motion
picture since 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. But, much
like that film, this is a movie where certain moments ring
unforgettably true, but as a whole The Hunted fails as a
thriller and joins the long ranks of the director’s other
near-miss feature films.
Opening on the
war-torn battlefields of Kosovo, the movie introduces Del Toro
as ace assassin and killing machine Aaron Hallam. Amidst the
atrocities of ethnic cleansing, Hallam is assigned to put a
particularly vicious Serbian general to death. Making his way
stealthily through the chaos and carnage, the young soldier can
only watch silently the indiscriminate killing – not only from
the Serbian soldiers but also from U.S. air strikes falling from
above – going on around him as he moves closer and closer to his
prey.
Awarded the
Silver Star for valor after completion of his mission, Hallam
does not find any honor in his actions. In fact, the brutal and
vicious slaughter of the Serbian general and his inaction
towards helping the slaughtered Bosnians fills his evenings with
nightmares, slowly driving him mad.
Three years
later, professional tracker and former military survival trainer
L.T. Bonham (Jones) lives in quiet isolation helping wounded and
trapped animals in the snowy wilderness of British Columbia.
Approached by the F.B.I with pictures of dead hunters brutally
dismembered a thousand miles away just outside of Portland, OR,
Bonham immediately recognizes the handiwork. This killer is
someone he has trained and the weary survivalist heads into the
Pacific Northwest knowing he may be the only one capable of
tracking down this former student.
Soon, it’s cat
and mouse as teacher and pupil warily close in on one another.
But the line between whom is the hunter and who is the hunted is
blurry, both Hallam and Bonham coming nearer to the realization
that their final confrontation will leave only one standing.
The first third
of The Hunted is eerily effective. Caleb Deschanel's (Fly
Away Home, The
Patriot) expert camera work during the lush jungle
scenes is beautiful, and Del Toro weaves his way from tree to
tree and bush to bush much like a human version of the Predator.
The killing of the two hunters is frightening and tense, and
after it was finished I was sure The Hunted was going to
turn into something special.
In many ways,
it is. Jones takes a rote and familiar character and does
amazing things with it. It’s a supremely internalized
performance busting with unease. Bonham is a man who has spent
his life teaching others to kill in the most malevolent ways
imaginable yet has never taken a human life himself. The growing
realization that all this mayhem and killing might be his fault,
and that he in fact will have to kill to bring it to an end,
slowly starts to eat away at his soul and Jones nails it.
Del Toro is
every bit his equal, though. It’s easy to believe Hallam has
descended into a sedate but completely uncontrollable madness.
Like a cat on the prowl, the soldier has become unhinged,
convinced all those around him are there to send him to his
grave. But, in the end, the one he cannot forgive the most is
the teacher who made him who he is. I’m not going to reveal why
this is so, but all the same, the enmity that builds between the
two is so palpable you could cut it with the proverbial knife.
So why doesn’t
The Hunted succeed? Well, first off, the screenwriting
gets increasingly more and more silly as the film progresses,
especially as it builds to the climactic fight between Hallam
and Bonham. The group I saw the film with couldn’t help but
snicker as the two manufactured their own weapons by hand out of
rusted steel and flint stone, and mainly because Friedkin takes
it all so beyond seriously it was hard to blame them for doing
so.
If only that
was the only moment of unintended humor. The Hunted is
littered with them. It is only because the actors are so good I
didn’t break out myself during some of the more insanely stupid
pieces of dialogue writing. Del Toro in particular is forced to
read lines that make George Lucas seem like a screenwriting
genius, but somehow he manages to get through them without
looking too bad.
The same can’t
be said for Connie Nielsen. Known mainly for her turn as
Princess Lucilla in Gladiator, the lovely actress is
stuck playing the FBI agent assigned to help Bonham capture the
killer. But The Hunted doesn’t do anything with her
leaving the actress to stand around looking stunned, cry for
dead friends or wrap her face up in pensive indignation when she
gets enraged. I felt sorry for her, and Friedkin does her know
favors by choosing to light her as if she has all the coloring
of a dead fish.
There is so
much wrong going on in The Hunted it’s hard to list it
all. Continuity errors – at one point Hallam appears slinking
through the trees in camouflage makeup when only moments later
he appears with his face freshly washed – plague the movie
almost from the get go, becoming more and more apparent as it
progresses. And, Friedkin and his editor Augie Hess have cut the
film so haphazardly that any point-of-view or consistent ideas
of landscape and design get thrown out the window. There is a
chase sequence between Hallam and Bonham through the streets of
Portland that begins promisingly enough, but soon devolves so
ungainly that I had no idea what was up and where was down. What
should have been a master class between tracker and prey instead
left me scratching my head.
It’s all
so sad for Del Toro and Jones deserve so much better than this.
They lend so much gravity to their roles, so much pathos to their
characters, I still find myself remembering little ticks and
nuances they did to bring them to life. If anything, I guess the
two can take solace in the fact no one is ever going to blame
them for the way The Hunted ultimately crashes violently
to pieces. Friedkin, however, won’t be as lucky. This continues
his post 70’s streak of failure, and I can’t help but wonder if
he’ll ever regain the touch that bought him to such prominence
three decades past.
