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Being a native Oregonian I had looked forward to seeing this big budget film that was shot in my own backyard (figuratively speaking). Throw in Academy Award winners Benicio Del Toro (for Traffic) and Tommy Lee Jones (for The Fugitive) and I thought there would be a good chance that I would enjoy the film. Boy was I ever mistaken. Even if you throw out the creative liberties taken by director William Friedkin (Rules of Engagement), the movie was still a bit unbelievable (in the same sense that the A-Team was unbelievable). We begin in Kosovo during the international incident in 1997 with the ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Albanians by the Serbian military and militias under the command of war criminal and former political leader Slobodan Milosevic. As bombs and gunfire rage all-around them, a CIA type incursion team begins an operation to assassinate a local Serb strongman who is in charge of the local slaughters. The person responsible for the actual assassination is Aaron Hallam (Del Toro), which he does with much anger and rage because this Serb is killing defenseless people. Now skip ahead a few years to the woods of Oregon where two hunters are out sport hunting for deer with their high-powered rifles and fancy scopes. Hallam changes the rules a bit with hunting and goes after these two for killing defenseless animals just for sport, and ends up killing and carving them up with only his knife. This leads to the FBI beginning an investigation, since the same thing apparently happened to a US Forest Service Ranger, which leads to them calling in a special deep-woods tracker by the name of L.T. Bonham (Jones, Men in Black II) who spends his time helping wildlife in British Columbia. In no time at all Bonham has his man, but that is just the beginning of the story as we learn about Bonham and Hallam. You see Bonham trained Hallam, and Hallam looks up to Bonham as a father figure, which you must remember back to the very opening of the movie where there is a reference to Abraham and some biblical story. While the FBI is interrogating him the CIA comes along and takes him into their custody, since Hallam doesn’t officially exist. Meanwhile, Bonham is busy getting to know female FBI agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen, One Hour Photo), all the while telling us his life story (just trains killers, doesn’t do the killing himself). As those two are getting cozy, and as you might guess, Hallam escapes from CIA custody, which is the point where the real hunt begins. During this hunt we learn of Hallam’s softer side with ex-girlfriend Irene Kravitz (Leslie Stefanson, Unbreakable) and her daughter Loretta (Jenna Boyd), and we learn how he can easily elude authorities (but only when it works for the film). Will they be able to catch this killer gone wild? I don’t know, this is a movie, so it’s a tough call. Others in this film include Aaron DeCone, Ron Canada, José Zúñiga, Bobby Preston, Mark Pellegrino, John Finn, Robert Blanche, plus many, many more. The writing was done by Peter and David Griffiths, plus Art Monterastelli. Tommy Lee Jones does fine in his role, but that’s what you would expect since he seems to track people down a lot in films (i.e. U.S. Marshals, Double Jeopardy, and The Fugitive). Del Toro is horrible in this role and it is so bad that it makes you wonder how he could be an Oscar winner! The film is just bad, and rather gory. The only good thing about this picture is that there are some nice action sequences, but that’s about it. With this bad of a film, I can only give The Hunted three couches out of ten. Adios.
Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:46:12 AM Click Here to get back into frames.
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