Survival expert L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) is hired by the FBI to track the murderer of a group of hunters.
Bonham’s quarry turns out to be Aaron Hallam (Benicio del Toro), a former decorated soldier he had once trained.
Haunted by his actions in special ops, Hallam is on a paranoid rampage of destruction.
Will Bonham be able to stop him?
My earliest memory of this movie was a poor review in the back of Empire magazine.
I was a reader for over a decade, but I have not read it since the late 2010s. The older I get, the more I feel its influence shaking away.
But every now and then, I catch a film that I have never seen but which has been already framed by my impression of the word from Empire.
The Hunted is the kind of thriller I love. I wish I had caught it earlier.
It is not a game changer, and I cannot say I am head-over-heels with the film. But in its pared-down ferocity, the film is effective.
The opening scene - a flashback to the antagonists' wartime experiences - almost feels like a different movie: lit and staged in a way that betrays its artifice, it works toward creating vividness of memory and trauma, heightened to its most essential, visceral elements.
Once we are dropped into the present, that vivid colour is replaced chilly blue filters. The film is grounding the viewer in the character's present.
Tommy Lee Jones’s entrance - tracking, freeing and treating a wolf - is a near wordless exercise that establishes Bonham as Del Toro's equal. In the following. scene, he tracks down the hunters responsible for the snare and doles out a suitable punishment.
The movie is wonderfully spare, moving from a scene of Del Toro’s Hallam getting a medal to a nightmare of his war experiences - whatever glory or status is immediately negated but showing what he lost to gain that piece of metal.
Then the movie cuts to 4 years later, he is in the Oregon woods, turning the tables on a group of hunters.
The story is basic, but the execution is so minimalist it turns the movie into an action movie haiku.
The plot is not worth paying attention to. The film is purely concerned with Hallam’s pursuit, and ends once he has caught his prey.
Filled with practical effects and stunts, it feels like the cleanest, most technically polished Seventies thriller ever made.
When Bonham finally kills his former student, it almost feels like an animal being put down.
The movie ends back at Bonham’s cabin. He looks out and watches the white wolf he saved at the beginning of the movie.
At least one predator he saved is free to live in its natural environment.
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