Review: 'The Hunted' gets idiotic
By Paul Clinton
CNN Reviewer
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Del Toro plays a Special Forces operator who has cracked and goes AWOL in "The Hunted."
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(CNN) -- The new psychological thriller "The Hunted," proves once again that even performances by two Academy Award-winning actors -- in this case Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro -- can't save a misconceived, misguided project and a one-note premise.
The movie actually begins with great promise as it opens with non-stop action depicting a battle scene during the war in Kosovo. Del Toro, as Aaron Hallam, is a Special Forces operator who's on a covert mission to assassinate a Serbian officer carrying out atrocities against Albanian civilians. Director William Friedkin provides startling images of a massive firefight. One scene is particularly moving when a young girl -- at the height of the killing -- retrieves her stuffed animal from a pile of bodies of her dead relatives who were just butchered by Serbian soldiers.
Hallam is rewarded with the Silver Star for valor, but it's faint compensation for the hideous nightmares he now suffers from the experience.
The film flashes forward to present day where L.T. Bonham (Jones) -- Hallam's mentor and teacher -- lives in retirement in the outermost regions of British Columbia. Home is a tiny cabin deep in the primal forest.
Private crusade
Hallam (Del Toro) escapes a number of times throughout the film.
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As we're introduced to Bonham, the film changes location to the deep woods of rural Oregon. Two hunters are tracked down and savagely murdered by a mysterious figure outraged by their high tech weapons with state-of-the-art sights and high powered bullets. In a strange disembodied voice which seems to come out of nowhere, the stranger tells the hunters that they are not sportsmen and are actually just murderers hunting down deer just for the thrill of it. One by one, the hunters are killed despite their impressive armament. Two other hunters are also killed in another location, and the F.B.I. is called into the case.
Of course, the killer is Hallam who has cracked, gone AWOL from the Special Forces, and is now on a private crusade. The Feds persuade Bonham to come out of retirement to hunt down his former student. In other words, it takes one to catch one. So far, so good.
Bonham goes into the woods, alone, unarmed with the parting words, "If I'm not back in two days I'm dead." Jones, with a leathery face that resembles a worn out World War II bomber jacket, is one of the few actors who can actually get away with saying that cheesy line.
Within hours, he has found Hallam and the F.B.I., which was never far behind, closes in and arrests the suspect. End of story? Hardly, we're only a half hour into the film.
Incessant getaways
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Jones plays an F.B.I. agent tracking down an assassin (Del Toro).
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Now things get real stupid, real fast. Time and again Hallam is cornered and trapped by Bonham, and time and again Hallam manages to escape. Getaways which are more amazing and mind boggling each time until they get to the point of absolute absurdity.
In fight after fight -- using just fists and knives -- they eventually inflict enough physical damage to each other that fixing them up would take an entire season of "ER." In one idiotic scene the two men are in the wilderness and each man fashions a knife out of scrap metal or rock. Bonham had just come from F.B.I. headquarters: You'd think they'd have had something he could borrow, if only a paring knife!
One of the most annoying aspects of this script by Art Monterastelli, with David and Peter Griffiths, is that at the outset the audience is encouraged to sympathize with Del Toro's character. Maybe he's just misguided, misunderstood and had a traumatic toilet training experience. The screenwriters even throw in -- and I mean throw in -- a couple of scenes with a girlfriend for Hallam. She even has a cute-as-a- button little girl who is crazy about Hallam -- a feeling the suddenly tender-hearted and apparently mindless killer returns. This weird effort to humanize Hallam seems like such a cheap shot. It also feels like half of this subplot ended up on the cutting room floor, thereby creating the feeling that the whole relationship came from an entirely different movie.
Another thing thrown in as sort of an afterthought is that Hallam has been sending Bonham letters for years asking for his help as he's gone slowly over the edge. For some reason, never explained, the letters are ignored, and in one of the final scenes, Bonham throws them into a fireplace.
Ultimately there is never any doubt as to the outcome of the film, and each capture, and subsequent miraculous escape, becomes more and more ludicrous. By the end you may find yourself screaming out, "Just kill him and get it over with!"
"The Hunted" opens nationwide on Friday, March 14. The film is rated "R."
