Tag Archives: The Hunt (2019)

Movies

The Hunt (2019), a (Mildly) Belated Review

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Back in 2019 the movie The Hunt was scheduled to be released but, after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Universal Studios decided to pause the release of the film (you can read about that here).

Before that happened, I wrote about the film and its original trailer, which I felt gave away pretty much the total story of the film (you can read the original article here, but beware that some of the embedded material, including that original trailer, were taken down).

If you go to that original article, I go into what this movie obviously is: Another riff on what I think may be the most adapted story of all time, Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game.

The story involved a shipwreck victim who washes up on an island only to realize the man who lives there has a peculiar habit: He likes to hunt human prey.

The story was first adapted into a movie with the same name in 1932 and since then I can’t count the times either movies or TV shows or books offer a similar story with that common theme: The idea that someone has decided to hunt humans.

Anyway, after a fashion The Hunt was finally released in March of 2020. This is one of the main trailers used for the film when it was finally released:

Earlier this morning I managed to finish the film off and… man, there is so much to like about it.

I loved Betty Gilpin as Crystal and Hilary Swank, in what amounts to a cameo, was wonderful as the hissable villain. The direction is crisp, the action presented bloody in a grindhouse way. And the concept, while once again owing to Richard Connell’s original story, manages for the most part to present an exciting variation of the well used hunter-hunting-humans concept.

Unfortunately…

The makers of the film, specifically screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, decided to add another element to the story. They decided to satire current right/left wing politics, presenting the “hunters” as stereotypical liberals and the hunted as stereotypical conservatives. I’m sure “on paper” it sounded like a clever idea, but for me that concept played out really quickly and soon became alternately off-putting and obvious while never quite being as humorous as I suspect they thought it was.

So we have scenes where the hunters talk about global warming or speak about racism while figuring out the proper way to call an African American and do this while gleefully murdering their “conservative” prey who we find slaughter endangered animals or have conspiracy podcasts… and it’s just not all that amusing.

John Carpenter in a few of his films takes on societal satire but manages to do so in a far more effective ways (check out Escape From New York or They Live). Here, I wished the film focused more on its main plot and, especially, Crystal and her fight for survival and not hit us over the head with so many too-obvious “jokes” about liberal or conservative silliness.

If the film had decided to accept and accentuate its Grindhouse elements more while toning down and/or eschewing the obvious -and after a while increasingly silly- political commentaries and not gotten so into the weeds about why the hunt existed (it is explained and, frankly, it was yet another dumb political element, IMHO), the film would have been much more successful.

As it is, if you are in the mood for some bloody fun and can ignore the annoyance of the “satire” that plays out much quicker than the writers thought, then you may find enough to enjoy in this film.

Movies

The Hunt (2019)… a little more…

A few days ago I posted about the movie The Hunt, set to be released some time this year, and how its trailer was, IMHO, a perfect example of giving away too much plot. (If you’re interested, you can read the original post here)

Welp, it appears it hid from me (either that or I was too dense to notice) the fact that the film presents a situation where “liberal elites” are the ones who make a sport out of hunting and killing the salt-of-the-earth Red State folk, something that, thanks to that explanation, becomes clear when re-watching the trailer video…

Given the mass shootings which occurred these past few days and initiated by what appear to be right wing types, the studio behind The Hunt realized their movie and its promos may be a little too provocative in times like these.

As Jeremy Fuster points out in his article presented on thewrap.com…

Universal pauses marketing campaign for “The Hunt” after mass shooting

There is a long history of provocation in the entertainment industry, be it music (Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner as protest against Vietnam), literature (A Clockwork Orange), and movies/TV (The Prisoner, Planet of the Apes -the original-, etc. etc.).

When done well, I tend to applaud takes on controversial subjects. The movie The Parallax View, for example, presented a paranoid view of the United States and those who have all the power and how they keep those who step out of line in check… sometimes through assassination. Warren Beatty, who played the protagonist in the film, is a newspaperman who stumbles upon the deep, dark secret behind a cabal that may be responsible for assassinations. The movie becomes a fascinating look at how an innocent man becomes a patsy through mind control (think Lee Harvey Oswald, for those who are conspiracy minded).

Reading up on The Hunt and it’s entire analogy/message, I can’t help but think: Is that it? Rip off The Most Dangerous Game but offer the “clever” twist that the hunters are homicidal liberal elites preying on the “good folks” of the red-states?

Really?

Good luck with that.

Movies

The perils of offering too much information…

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…specifically, when it comes to a trailer of a film:

Set to be released later this year, The Hunt clearly owes a great deal to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. It is my opinion Mr. Connell’s work is one of the most adapted stories ever.

The original story involved a hunter who falls overboard while in the Amazon, swims to an island, and there finds a palatial estate run by two Russians. One is mute and the other chillingly tells our protagonist he will be released into the wilds and hunted down.

The story was a big success and in 1932 RKO pictures released the first adaptation of the story in a movie by the same name. The film was produced by the same people behind the original King Kong and, if you look close enough, you’ll see that in some of the jungle scenes of The Most Dangerous Game (the film), are identical to those used in King Kong!

Since that first film, and as I mentioned above, there have been innumerable adaptations of this general story, where a seemingly powerless person(s) are hunted by people with weapons and they turn the tide in time…

These are but two examples (and fairly recent ones) of the use of The Most Dangerous Game plot. Essentially, any story you see which involves people hunting others for sport, you’re dealing with a story inspired by Richard Connell’s famous short story.

The point of this entry, however, is not to present the history of this particular story but rather point out something that is very bothersome: A movie trailer giving away an entire film’s story.

I mean, come on…!

Why bother going to see this movie as almost everything seems to have been spoiled in the above trailer? We learn who the bad guys are, what they’re up to, who the protagonist is, and we even see that the two have a confrontation in her mansion toward the end. Along the way we also learn about how a few of the “prey” get killed and…

…sheesh.

Why do movie studios insist on giving everything away? Can they not make a trailer that leaves a few surprises?

Which reminds me of the trailer that most egregiously, IMHO, gave away everything: The original trailer for Terminator 2. Here it is:

I mean… wow. Watching this trailer today I’m still furious about how much was given away of the story.

Remember: The first Terminator had Arnold Schwarzenneger play the bad guy and, if you were to watch that film and Terminator 2 one after the other (and without any prior knowledge of what goes on in them), director James Cameron does a masterful job of keeping the fact that Arnold’s Terminator in the second film is “good”. In fact, Cameron made it appear he was just as bad this time around as the first film, hunting his “prey” (this time John Connor) while, simultaneously, a mysterious other individual, who looked an awful lot like Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese from the first film, was also tracking the boy down.

This all leads to a point in the film where, in a mall, the young John Connor is trapped between Arnold’s Terminator and the mysterious Robert Patrick character. We figure Arnold’s Terminator would try to kill Connor and then…

….surprise…!

Arnold’s Terminator turns out to be the good guy this time around!

It would have made for a terrific twist to audiences back in 1991… except that damn trailer gave it all away.

I recently watched, for the first time in years, Terminator 2 and was astonished by just how much effort James Cameron put into making that twist work.

Too bad the studios decided to chuck the movie’s biggest surprise by revealing it in the trailer.