When The Hunt was delayed from its September 2019 release, an appeal arose. With the premise of conservatives being hunted by liberals, many conservatives overreacted, including POTUS. Thus the film was delayed, even though a thriller of this nature would favor the conservatives as the heroes. Both perspectives were wrong. Both sides are bad in this empty excuse of a provocative thriller.
A Political Squabble
The film exists in what we can assume is the present day. This is made evident from the opening social media interaction of calling the President a rat and kinda/sorta joking about killing some deplorables. We then cut to a collective of liberals preparing to hunt captured conservatives.
Very quickly, the hunt commences. Numerous prey are pursued in a micro anthology scene of subverting perspectives. Think the film is about the Blonde who wakes up first? Think again.
Questioning the Killing
The film fluctuates within its sloppy satire of the situation. The conservatives are framed as spouters of snowflake and liberal conspiracies. The liberals are staged as activists of guilt, short-fused by sugary sodas and climate change. So who do we side within this battle of Reddit warriors?
Betty Gilpin is more or less our protagonist as the most intelligent of prey, Crystal. She is smart enough to know when she is being deceived by her predators and strong enough to kick all their asses. Gilpin is by far the highlight in this film in terms of her action iconography. She launches herself into battered and bruised fights with gusto. Watching her go head to head with the antagonist of the evil elite played by Hilary Swank is without question the highlight.
Sloppy Satire
While there is plenty of surprising action and gore, The Hunt is utterly hindered in its script. It would appear that such a scenario would be ripe for political commentary given the extreme natures of the political spectrum. Yet the film feels as though it were written in Twitter type and Reddit ramblings. Characters speak in exaggerations most cartoonish, much akin to South Park.
However, just as with South Park, this film has a massive stumbling in its political nihilism. I was tempted to take the film as a satire on both sides, but it just doesn’t stack up. Satire condemns its targets and while The Hunt tries to paint both sides as silly, it fumbles in this condemning department when it comes to its subversion. One conservative prey believes the immigrants they stow away with are crisis actors, a familiar talking point of far-right podcasters. He is soon proven right. Meanwhile, the liberals are seen as those talking about climate change without doing anything about it.
Lost in Nihilism
What’s most frustrating about The Hunt is that it merely meanders around the topic and never finds much to say. There’s a moment where Crystal tells her surviving companion the tale of the tortoise and the hare but twists it so the hare murders the tortoise. Her partner is confused, asking who they’re supposed to be in that story. She doesn’t know. Does the movie know? Or does it just think that story would be way cooler with gore?
This film functions in a similar manner. It poses the likes of Battle Royale into a scenario caked with political buzzwords and goofy gabs at rhetoric. Yet it has nothing to say about any of it. The story reduces both sides to the same level, which is a bit concerning that climate change is a topic placed on the same plane of comedy as believing the Jews control all the media. The film just keeps finding ways to subvert for more surprise than insight, right up to the clumsy and embarrassing insertion and misreading of Animal Farm.
Conclusion: The Hunt
For the marketing leaning hard into its political provocativeness, The Hunt is little more than an empty exercise in violence smeared in edgy-teen rhetoric. It’s a satire that doesn’t seek out to mock the politically vocal for little more than being loud. It doesn’t take issue because issues are presented as being more for sport than true cares of the world. The politically extreme is never given enough rope to show how they hang themselves in their ideologies. All of those thoughts are lost in a film with its vision blurred by blood, presenting an action thriller that deserves far better writing than this limited lamentation on political discourse.
What did you think of The Hunt? How does it stack up compared to the likes of the recent action film Bloodshot? Let us know in the comments below.
The Review
The Hunt
A political thriller with more guts than brains.
PROS
- Great action sequences
- Gritty gore
- Darkly subversive
CONS
- Aimless political commentary
- Sloppy and stumbling satire
- Cringe-worthy dialogue
