The Hunt (

2020

) ½

This film is a pretty useful case study for when it is and when it isn't a wise idea to delay the release of your film due to events going on outside the cinema. Somehow this film managed to make the wrong call not once but twice. Originally, The Hunt was scheduled to release in September 2019 but was delayed because of an unusual concentration of horrific mass shootings. The thing is, this is a movie about rich bastards hunting their political adversaries in Croatia, it has nothing to do with either the El Paso or Dayton shootings. We're not talking about a movie like The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), a film glorifying a high school student massacring their peers, coming out a couple of weeks after the Columbine shooting. Personally, even in the case of films like that, I think studios should stick to their guns and screen them, if only because art's ability to strike an uncomfortable nerve is something that should be cherished, rather than avoided. All the same, I can understand why a studio would be afraid of ruffling a few feathers given the close link between the film's subject matter and the horrific real-world events. However, with The Hunt, this just isn't the case. About the only resemblance this film has to the real-life incidents is that people are killed by bullets. Unfortunately for all of us, this is the age of Twitter, where a couple of dozen lunatics can hold billion-dollar corporations hostage with the illusion of popular opinion. I bet the studio executives are wishing they didn't listen to attention whores on social media now that they've released their movie in the middle of a global epidemic that has left theaters shuttered and people afraid to leave their houses. A couple of unrelated mass shootings are a stupid reason to delay a movie; a plague that paralyzes nations is not. See the difference? At least some of the damage was offset by offering the film on stream services, so it won't be a complete boondoggle. Still, it should serve as a lesson for studios, don't let yourself be bullied by a bunch of moral scolds on social media.

The film's premise is that a cadre of coastal elites kidnaps a bunch of idiotic conspiracy theorists, take them to Croatia, and then hunt them down for sport al la The Most Dangerous Game (1932). All this is perversely the result of the coastal elites being mistakenly accused of just such an action by the same conspiracy theorists they are now hunting down. At the core of this story, there is a potentially interesting nugget of social commentary: That by expecting the worse from our political opponents we are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Treat vast swaths of the population like they are monsters and you should expect that some in those groups will begin to act like they are monsters, at least to you anyway. However, there is a bit of a problem with the believability of the scenario. When was the last time you saw billionaire elites lose their careers or political opportunities because of online conspiracy theories? These are people who have the entire apparatus of the establishment media ready and willing to go to bat for them. If there is no evidence aside from a careless text message or an ambiguous tweet they can rest assured in the fact that their indentured servants in news media will close ranks and demand the right to be forgotten. At worst they lay low for a year or two and then go right back to whatever highly lucrative or highly influential career they had before. Cancel culture, with few exceptions, does not damage people with power. When it does actually get someone with pull and influence, like Harvey Weinstein, its because the accusers are also people of considerable stature. The political elite can generally insult, molest, mistreat and demean the rest of us with impunity. We live in a time where a likely candidate for president has been accused of sexual assault, and the media quietly ignores it; a time where celebrities and cultural commentators demanded a teenager get the shit kicked out of him for smiling funny and wearing a MAGA hat; and also a time where some off-color joke a nobody made ten years ago can be a reason to bar them from ever seeking gainful employment. The rules just aren't the same, and by pretending otherwise I can only assume that The Hunt is trying to deliberately mislead its audience.

As satire The Hunt fails, not because it is not believable (satire, after all, allows grotesque exaggerations), but because it is not funny. Seriously, the only times the film managed to get a chuckle from me or my wife was when I bombarded us with gross-out shock humor. Even here, it doesn't demonstrate the range or creativity of something like The Naked Killer (1992); it can't even rise to the level of an average episode of South Park. All of the characters in the film, save our protagonist and her only because we know so little about her, are odious caricatures that can't die off quickly enough. It's like this is a later entry into the Friday the 13th series but instead of Jason killing a bunch of annoying teens we have a bunch of annoying teens killing some other annoying teens. The film's penchant for making explicit references to Orwell's Animal Farm also does not help it in this department. If you're making a second rate satire film don't remind me of much better satire throughout the runtime.

The only character in the film who isn't completely insufferable is our protagonist, Snowball. She is the sort of taciturn, impossibly competent bad-ass who seems to be the norm for female action leads in $_CURRENT_YEAR. There is no situation that she's placed in where she doesn't instantly gain the upper hand, and no character, save for Athena the leader of the vengeful libtards, that is anywhere even close to a match for her. As a result, once she turns up in the film all tension in any situation instantly evaporates. Not once in the entire film does she find herself behind the eight-ball, or even moderately threatened. The result is some well-choreographed action sequences that feel utterly devoid of any tension. Fortunately for us, she is at least off-camera for the first fifteen or twenty minutes so we can have a bit of suspense and tension at the start of the film where we're still trying to figure out which one of the gagged rednecks is our view-port character.

Despite being a satire of contemporary politics, this film manages to also mire itself in contemporary gender politics quite by accident. Every man that both Athena and Snowball encounter are completely worthless. Snowball is partnered at first with Gary a fat sack of shit who falls for every trap and has to be constantly saved by Snowball. Then he wanders off and she meets Don, another fat sack of shit who falls for every trap and has to be constantly saved by Snowball. I have a question: Why are these guys two separate characters? Wouldn't it make more sense to combine them into a single role if you were going to have one overweight, useless dullard tagging along with our brave and capable protagonist? Better yet, why not make one of them the worthless comic relief character and the other a capable foil who has some redeeming features and useful skills even if he differs in some way from the protagonist? Why do modern writers think that the only way they can make a female action hero is by having her surrounded by worthless idiots? In Aliens (1986) Ripley is not made any less heroic by the presence of Hicks, likewise Sarah Conner in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is no less bad-ass because she shares the screen with The Terminator. Only second rate action movies have to make everyone but the protagonist incompetent for the protagonist to look cool.