The Hunted Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)March 18th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE HUNTED
Directed by William Friedkin
Rated R, 94 minutes
Two Stars
Monet painted lots of water lilies. Kean painted sad-eyed children till his fingers grew numb. Lots of artists repeat themselves, trying to wring another drop of divinity from the same sponge. So it should not necessarily come as a surprise to find Tommy Lee Jones back on the trail of another fugitive.
His quarry this time is not an unjustly accused doctor, but an ex-G.I turned civilian killing machine. He's Sgt. Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), an elite commando who overdosed on violence in the Balkans and now prowls the forests around Seattle like a phantom PETA vigilante, filleting hunters who try to draw a bead on deer with their oversized rifles. Where he developed his soft spot for deer isn't explored. Maybe he just doesn't like hunters.
We see Hallam first in Kosovo, in a nightmare scene of ecstatic brutality, going after a sadistic Serbian general who's conducting a massacre of ethnic Albanian civilians. Director William Friedkin must have been watching "Wag the Dog", because he does not scruple to insert amongst the carnage a little girl wandering through the acres of corpses and plucking her teddy bear from the cold dead hands of her slain mother. Moments later Hallam finds the fiend and slices him into jerky, for which he gets a medal: "Your courageous actions are the bedrock upon which peace and democracy have always been built."
Meanwhile, L.T. Bonham (Jones) is living his own PETA-friendly life in the north woods; we discover him in the snow tracking a white wolf who's got a trap on his leg, and freeing the animal, who is so grateful he barely snarls at Bonham as he works in close quarters to remove the snare. Bonham then tracks down the offending trapper, but doesn't chop him up; he just throws the trap at him and tells him to mind his manners. This difference in approach explains why Bonham is called in by the FBI to hunt down Hallam. He protests: "I don't do that kind of work any more..." But he can't refuse. Back in their military days, it was Bonham who trained Hallam and taught him everything he knows about killing.
Hallam regards Bonham as a father figure, and lest you miss this, Johnny Cash growls Dylan's Abraham and Isaac material from "Highway 61 Revisited" over the opening credits. Hallam has written Bonham scores of letters, presumably pouring out his heart about this crazy compulsion of his and asking for guidance, but Bonham isn't much of a one for letters or sentiment. "I trained a lot of guys," he grunts to FBI team leader Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), who does her best to look tough and find something to do, but has about as much business in this movie as Ralph Nader at a Gore family reunion.
There is so much cliché to this movie that its quality sneaks up on you like a...well, like a woodland tracker. It emerges from three distinct channels. First and foremost is the photography by Caleb Deschanel ("The Right Stuff", "Anna and the King"), which spreads the texture and color of forest and city across the screen with rich impasto. Next is the sure action sense of Friedkin, who has spent most of his career squandering the talent that manages to burst forth from time to time in movies like "The French Connection". And finally there are the skills of Del Toro and Jones, who come to work like solid lunchpail pros, shouldering aside the dialogue and absurd situations to find something individual and credible to do. For Jones, it's a way of moving - he skitters through the woods and the cityscape half-sideways and pigeon-toed, like a bunion-plagued linebacker sliding along the defensive line looking for a gap.
But gaps are hard to find, despite the nimble work of these stalwarts. Exposition crowds the action, as characters fill each other in on the backgrounds of other characters ("I pulled your file....") Sentimentality clogs the pores; unsated by the little girl in the Kosovo sequence, Friedkin offers up another one in Seattle, the daughter of Hallam's ex-girlfriend, to show the killer's sensitive side. Improbability litters the playing field. Hallam leaves clear, complete, and distinct footprints everywhere he goes, whether in woodsy moss or city concrete. We don't need Tommy Lee Jones, Pee Wee Herman could've tracked him. But we have Jones, so he catches him every ten minutes or so, and then Hallam has to get away again. The only thing that finally stops him for good is the movie's running time.
It sounds unbearably tedious, but the movie keeps grabbing you in unexpected ways. In spite of everything, there are breathless sequences that keep you engaged, and half convince you that this movie is a lot better that you know it could possibly be.
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