Psychos in the Muck: The Hunted
 Knifefighting in The Hunted |
For better or for worse, there is a time when every SUV driving denizen of Hollywood feels obligated to actually drive his vehicle out of the city and into the mountains for which it was ostensibly made.
Perhaps one of these trips inspired The Hunted. The movie certainly has the touch of someone who managed to escape the city just long enough to fantasize about living with wolves, scurrying through the muck with a homemade survival knife, and other fantasies best dreamt from the comfort of an air conditioned Ford Explorer.
Tommy Lee Jones’ L.T. Bonham character takes nary a water bottle or flashlight before scurrying through the temperate rain forest after his quarry, burned out special ops veteran Aaron Hallam (Benecio del Toro). Nor does L.T. seem capable of experiencing cold, whether tromping hatless through the snow in a Canadian winter or wrestling under a waterfall.
Likewise, the snappy female FBI lead is dressed in fashionable stovepipe jeans with a fancy silver belt buckle and wades through rivers without a second thought. She strikes one as the kind of woman you might bump into in a bar in Aspen apres ski, but never in the woods, hunting a psycho in the muck.
All this said, The Hunted is rich with detail and slated to be a cult favorite among redneck commando survivalist types and maybe a few others as well. The Hunted contains plenty of scenes of sniffing out prey, forging weapons, ambushing authorities, setting traps and engaging in other useful, outdoor skills that will come in handy when our industrial society finally collapses. L.T.’s government sponsored stalking of the “ecoterrorist” Hallam suggests the massive manhunt that will take place when Rush Limbaugh/G.W. Bush inspired rednecks finally seize the reigns of power and purge the country of liberals, homosexuals, and other undesirables in the New AmeriKKKa.
At the same time, The Hunted actually has some progressive sensibilities as well - or at least hints thereoff…
In its own action movie way, The Hunted takes into account man’s stewardship of nature (L.T. saves a wolve from a hunter’s leg trap and them lambasts the hunter); the impact of man’s diet of the suffering of other lifeforms (Hallam defends his vegetarianism); the vanishing of human survival skills like hunting, tracking, and hand to hand combat; and ultimately the relation between the city and natural space (distinctively blurred).
At a time when the planet is in a state of possibly irreversible doom at the hands of industrialization and overpopulation, The Hunted is actually one of the few mainstream films to consider questions of environment and man. Damn good fight scenes, too.
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