The Hunt has a lot to say.
Or rather, it has a lot that it wants to say.
Actually, maybe it just wants you to think it has a lot to say.
Full disclosure: I'm not entirely sure.
I do know that it's moderately entertaining on a basic level. Blumhouse Productions' B-movie slasher satire is breezy, brief, and brutal. It's occasionally funny too, though its field goal percentage in that department certainly isn't stellar. Most notably, Betty Gilpin's leading turn as an Afghanistan veteran of few words—who's on a tear against the rich "elites" who are hunting her—is fiercely confident and probably the one thing most responsible for The Hunt being a good time.
Enough has already been said about this movie's place as an "issue of the week" on social media last summer, when the trailer dropped and conservatives immediately interpreted this as a piece of liberal propaganda promoting the slaughter of right-wingers. (I can tell ya, unsurprisingly, it ain't that.) Smartly, Universal Studios opted out of the dispute by delaying the film seven months, well beyond the short attention span of the internet. Now it's back, under a marketing campaign that wears its "controversy" as a badge.
The premise is a modern, further politicized rendition of Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the classic story of the wealthy literally hunting commonfolk for sport. Here, the wealthy are referred to as the "liberal elite," snobs who muse and badger one another over politcally correct terminology and labels. They refer to their conservative, rednecky prey as "deplorables"—an obvious reference to Hillary Clinton's 2016 speech in which she chose the word to describe many Trump supporters.
In the opening minutes, we're introduced to a number of these "deplorables": poor, unaware people who wake up in a field with gags in their mouths and a box full of guns to distribute among themselves. As they begin to get picked off from a distance, they realize they're being hunted. We follow a number of them, played by semi-famous actors like Emma Roberts, Ike Barinholtz, and Justin Hartley, as they attempt to survive the initial bloodbath.
They aren't successful.
That is, until we meet Gilpin's character, referred to over the elites' radios as "Snowball." It quickly becomes apparent that Snowball is better than the libs at their own game, as she uses her wit and tactical knowledge to gradually tear through each of them on her way to the alleged maestro of the carnage, Athena (Hilary Swank).
Along the way, lots of fun is poked at the rich lefties for their insistence on using socially preferred terms and not mislabeling various groups of people—classist murder spree, aside, I'm not really sure what's so wrong with engaging in that kind of behavior, beyond maybe their contrived, selfish motivations for doing so. There are also a few jokes here and there aimed at the conservative Deplorables, as they talk about crisis actors and various deep-state conspiracies, but based on the reactions of the central Indiana crowd in my screening, I have a feeling the satire aimed at conservatives is maybe too occasional and too subtle to really hit home.
Essentially, it feels lop-sided. While I'm pretty certain writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof didn't want this to be read as a straight conservative satire of the left, as it was marketed—Lindelof wrote and directed the incisively progressive reimagining of Alan Moore's Watchmen on HBO last year—it does feel as though most of the leftist commentary is lost in the final execution. The liberal Elites are undeniably the villains of this story, and the shortcomings of the Deplorables are mostly swept under the rug in light of the fact that they are literally being hunted down and murdered for their political stances. The morality of the central conflict is relatively clean-cut. And I find that confusing, particularly for a film that seems to want to critique groups on both sides of the political spectrum.
But even with the unequal political scoreboard aside, the "commentary" at play here never really digs beyond the rhetoric of something your grandmother might share on Facebook. "Hardy-har, liberals are overly sensitive." "Heehee, conservatives hate brown people." So at the end of the day, what was the point of saying anything when what you have to say amounts to so little? Why bother interrogating both sides of contemporary politics in such shallow fashion? Perhaps Lindelof would have executed a better version of this story had he directed it himself; director Craig Zobel seems frequently unsure of what message he wants to send in a given scene, and yet he delivers it with the fervor of an angry keyboard warrior in the comment section of an ad for a presidential candidate they don't like. He doesn't know what he's saying, but, by God, he's gonna say it.
Ultimately the burden rests on Gilpin to make the whole thing fun, and she does a remarkable job, given the environment. I'm not sure I'd like Snowball if I met her in real life or saw her behavior on social media, but as a defiant victim of an unfair system, she's a pleasure to watch. There's a contorted viscerality in her facial expressions—which at times seem like odd choices, but I wouldn't change them—and her beefy physicality during action scenes really nails it home that she's just fed up with this shit.
I'm still not entirely sure if I liked this movie, or whether or not it's good. The awkwardness and emptiness of its commentary would tell me that it's problematic trash that we'd be better off for disregarding. But I can't deny I was never bored, and felt some satisfaction from all of Snowball's kills.
I don't know, part of me thinks that just maybe Lindelof and Cuse were attempting to make a critique of white people, on both sides of the aisle. Maybe something about how we tend to think of it as our responsibility—or burden (yikes)—to "deal with" and label the issues facing minorities and oppressed people rather than just handing over the floor to them and listening.
But firstly, I don't really want to be the awkward white dude who tries to make a definitive assessment on the success of that critique, given the film's uneven execution, and secondly... that just feels like it's giving The Hunt way too much credit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sowGYbxTPgU&w=585