Review: The Hunt

A group of people wake up in the middle of the countryside only to discover they’re being hunted for sport. It’s a remake of The Most Dangerous Game (or if you prefer, Hard Target), but there’s a twist; this time the rich evil hunters are rich left-wing evil hunters!  It's Go Woke Go Broke(n Neck) The Movie!

Okay, there’s a lot more twists than just the specific blather the wealthy murderers come out with; this is a film that prides itself on at least trying to keep you guessing, and the multiple surprises - combined with a tight 90 minute run time - makes this an entertainingly fast, if not exactly deep, B-movie. The kills are gory when required, discreet when not, and the fight scenes are decent enough to work as pay offs when the stalking scenes peter out.

That said, it’s the overtly political slant that's the big marketing hook here (as the story unfolds it turns out to be slightly more complex than merely a bunch of Hillary lefties hunting “deplorables”), especially considering a resulting tweetstorm from President Trump resulted in this being pulled from release schedules late last year. 

Now in 2020 scriptwriter David Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s deliberately controversial and intentionally superficial politics seem almost quaint, though many of the jokes still land thanks to director Craig Zobel’s jokey approach. The underlying moral is basically that rich people are dicks and loudmouths deserve what they get, which is something 99% of the audience can get behind, so the chances of anyone being authentically outraged by a collection of online buzzwords being deployed for comedy effect is fairly slim.

But the politics, like the action and the twists, are all part of a whole, and The Hunt moves quickly enough and darts enthusiastically enough from one to the other and back again to make the whole thing firmly entertaining as a kind of polished-up take on what would otherwise be a direct-to-obscurity slice of genre fun.

This isn't exactly the kind of film you watch for the performances, but Betty Gilpin as one of the more durable hunted is a clear stand-out, turning a fairly generic role into a star turn via a likable combination of wariness and world-weariness that's winning. Everybody else gets a flashy death.

- Anthony Morris