Guest Column: A Review Of The Hunted, Why You Should Watch It

Review : The Hunted (2003) by Frenchie Pred
Runtime: 94 Mins
Rated: R  for strong bloody violence and some language

What To Expect: First Blood, but this time he kills people.

The early 00ies are not popular for their great movies,but there are some out there. And you need to dig them up,The Hunted is one of them.

An Oregon cold setting and story reminescent of First Blood, rainforests, grey, rainy sky, it’s cold and bleak throughout.  The story of Bonham (Benicio Del Toro), a trained spec op soldier starting to kill people due to PTSD, a soldier that could not turn it off. He uses a knife as a weapon of choice. His mentor (Tommy Lee Jones ) introduced in a manly way, when he is smashing a wolf hunter’s face against a table, is called in to help the FBI catch him after the slaying of four deer hunters.(On a side note, one of them was the bald henchman in Cliffhanger, always cool to see him.)

Connie Nielsen plays the third main character as a FBI agent and she behaved like a true human being would…no cliché here. But the movie focus almost exclusively on Del Toro and Jones.The movie is straight and to the point, it could have been 30 minutes longer, and develop the characters more deeply, but Friedkin was right to not drag the audience into whinning and boredom.There is no romance, no forced jokes and no bullshit. Just one scene with Bonham’s wife and kid. The score is not outstanding nor memorable, but it doesn’t ruin scenes either, so that fits.

There are a few good chases, a few nicely edited and choregraphied bloody knife and close combat fights (no shaky cam here) and a couple of nice flashback scenes, one of them being the intro of the movie, a mission during the
Croatian war, a pretty violent scene that sets the tone immediately. The movie has also a pretty nice nod to Predator during the third act… the kind of stuffs that always put a smile on your face.

You don’t get bored watching this action/thriller, it’s full of pratical blood and gritty all the way. To quote the serbian commander during the intro: “They fucked our mothers.We will fuck theirs.”