A cinematic hate letter to our country.
At a time when the Coronavirus is attacking the world, and plaguing its people and the movie industry, Universal Pictures has found the audacity to release “The Hunt,” which was originally scrapped from the schedule, because of its depiction of the Trump Era. And being that I am a film critic, it’s my duty to see what I was supposed to miss, and it’s just what we need right now.
That was sarcasm, because the movie is a pointless, mindless, and aimless movie about the evils inside America. There are stars you may or may not recognize, who either get killed off or labored, depending on how the filmmakers (director Craig Zobel, writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, and producer Jason Blum) chose to lead them.
Another reason for its scrapping is because of its premise of liberals killings people for sport. Hilary Swank as the mastermind behind the games calls those prey “deplorables.” That, instead of just rednecks. It’s like “Ready or Not” or “The Purge” in a blender. I mean that in the analogy of putting your hand in one.
And these deplorables would include Emma Roberts, who immediately gets her head blown off once the game starts; Ike Barinholtz who gets shot in a fake convenience store; Ethan Suplee as a podcaster; and Betty Gilpin as a solider and the only human to penetrate the system.
And spoiler alert: the games were meant as revenge for a social media joke gone wrong. I’ve had enough problems seeing the life-threatening trends on Twitter as it is.
One scene did make me laugh. Gilpin and Suplee both end up on a train with immigrants, and Suplee knows they’re just actors. I don’t know; there’s something kind of politically incorrect in this part, that it actually tickled me.
Other than that one ounce of comedy, “The Hunt” jumps to conclusions, and lets the slaughtering consume the movie. People gets blown up, shot in the face, and one of them lands in a spike trap. They’re given excuses of being bad people, but we don’t really know why they’re bad, because the movie only vaguely shares with us the villains’ perspectives. We never get to see or hear their side of the story, because they’re getting killed off.
Gilpin has proven herself worthy with her role in “Isn’t It Romantic,” and Swank is a charming actress; but both of them are blandly written and played. And there’s no point in casting Roberts and Barinholtz if they’re going to get liquidated, unless they were meant to be guest stars. They’re so underwritten.
“The Hunt” shouldn’t have been scrapped; it should have been erased from the cosmos.
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