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animalslifestyle · 3 years

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A group of wealthy people gather in a remote location to hunt humans for sport!!!

“The Hunt” opens with a group of NPR-addicted neoliberals hunting a wild pack of Trump-worshipping MAGA types for bloodsport. Director Craig Zobel’s ultra-violent satirical version of “The Most Dangerous Game” aims to be the movie that America needs right now; it’s a joyful slaughterhouse of mirrors that hopes to bring our country together and make it great again by reflecting the silliness of us vs. them animosity. The film literalizes the language of a culture war that has split the United States into “globalist cucks who rule the deep state” and “redneck deplorable,” with no wriggle room in between. Blumhouse’s newest low-budget social commentary attempts to distinguish between centrists and nihilists — “bothsidesism” and “nosidesism” — in order to demonstrate the self-destructive folly of mutual dehumanization.

On the one hand, the movie’s thesis was proven in the most idiotically predictable way possible, as the world’s loudest right-wing troll saw “The Hunt” through the limited prism of his preconceptions and mislabeled it a liberal dream sight unseen. That triggered response, on the other hand, suggested that things were a little too fucked for such a head-on piece of shlock to make sense of the mess we’d caused, or do anything more than draw a body chalk outline around the corpse of the idealized American citizen. Zobel’s tight, well-crafted, and deviant grindhouse take on the national temperature has no problem caricaturing what ails us, but even that entertaining combination lacks the killing instinct necessary to see us more clearly than we see each other.

On a scene-by-scene basis, though, “The Hunt” is one of the most unsanitized and devilish Hollywood thrillers to hit the big screen in a long time. It begins with a cold splash to the face — the type of mind-numbing group text about our “ratfuck president” that the majority of people in this nation will recognize — and then gets down to work with a series of violent misdirections that help erase the value of human life.

A dozen or so high-on-drugs rednecks awaken drowsy and gagged in the middle of a field someplace. One of them is a young blonde (Emma Roberts) dressed in a beautiful teal ski outfit that screams “Urban Outfitters travels to Aspen.” Another is a pot-bellied porch-sitter (Wayne Duvall) with a strong Southern accent and a potentially dangerous secret. Others include an aggro Staten Island bro (Ike Barinholtz), a soap opera handsome Southern guy (“This Is Us” star Justin Hartley), and a xenophobic conspiracy theorist (Ethan Suplee, who is later joined by his “Blue Ruin” co-star Macon Blair) who cites a QAnon-style Reddit thread about Trump supporters being kidnapped and hunted by rich Democrats in Vermont. When a sniper’s bullet bursts someone’s skull like a bloody pimple, that type of fringe thinking becomes more plausible. Inside a trap pit, the next redshirt is disemboweled by the spikes, and a few others are blasted to oblivion. The search has begun, and the growing mistrust lends a great element of “Battle Royale” tension to the mayhem that ensues.

Before the film’s rebellious heroine eventually emerges to question that notion, the unhinged first act accumulates gobs of “no one is safe” cred (in a very good and silly scene that dares to imagine what a human safari designed by a Rachel Maddow superfan might look like). Crystal is a strong woman who can defend herself, and “Glow” actress Betty Gilpin portrays her with almost sociopathic coldness in an amazing and weird performance that bridges the gap between Linda Hamilton and “No Country for Old Men” baddie Anton Chigurh.

Despite having a thick Arkansas accent that would make a lazy northern outsider assume the worst, Crystal is the only character who appears perplexed by the overall “elites vs. deplorables” issue at hand. It’s possible that she just doesn’t care — that such political tribalism looks ludicrous in these circumstances — but it’s almost as if she’s oblivious or apathetic to what’s going on in this nation at times. However, she is the only individual who appears to believe that they are not in “this country” at all.

What happens next is best left unspoilt, but it’s worth noting that the screenplay (co-written by Damon Lindelof and the son of his fellow “Lost” creator, Nick Cuse) takes little time in moving on from its setup. Before the rules of the game are even set, “The Hunt” leaps the fence and attempts to run in another way. That erratic choice has mixed consequences, as a few creative set-pieces can’t save the film’s main concepts from becoming jumbled when they bleed over into “the real world.” The pace slows, the focus shifts, and the story’s background begins to shrink; bland, uninterested world-building is an unusual accusation to level at a Lindelof script, but “The Hunt” is too preoccupied with earning easy chuckles to go any deeper into its own concept.

A 90-minute B-movie about a hilariously PC “Westworld” does not require the same kind of mythology as an HBO series, but the fact that “The Hunt” parodies our world does not prevent it from inventing its own. As funny as it is to watch these righteous, homicidal latté-sippers cancel each other out over using “the n-word” while waiting to gun down the innocent strangers they’ve kidnapped (they even make sure to abduct a black guy for “diversity”), there’s only so far you can stretch the most basic stereotypes of the political class. Cuse and Lindelof provide enough spice to the situation to keep “The Hunt” from losing its flavor — one detail evoking Bruce Willis in particular is fantastic — but the concentration on these caricatures leaves Crystal with little opportunity to move between them.

Even when “The Hunt” falls short of its full promise, Zobel never slacks, and despite a clear lack of resources, he shoots the climactic fight with such an exquisite feeling of tongue-in-cheek bedlam that you only wish the entire film could have the same mastery of its brutality. It’s the most hilarious sequence of its sort since the opening brawl in “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” and the absurdity of it all undermines right-wing conspiracy theories by taking them at face value: Trump’s obsessive fear-mongering begs people to believe that things like this are happening, and it only takes their agreeing to it once. We now live in a National Enquirer world, and the more bizarre things become, the simpler they are to believe.

But, at an age when actual life has become a parody of itself, satire can no longer afford to be just diagnostic; it must muddle the waters, map out the sunken areas, and fight its way back up to an unshakeable position of truth. “The Hunt” barely goes halfway. It sketches a catastrophic schism in this country and then spends the remainder of its running time looking down into it.

Gilpin is sensational as a woman who is alien to America as we know it (and it would be interesting to ask a bunch of different viewers who they think Crystal would vote for in 2020, if anyone), but by the time all the cards are on the table, the most unrealistic aspect of “The Hunt” is the idea that anyone watching it might learn to appreciate the humanity of those on the other side.

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUvYQqHaJulahGrU942ONQ

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Sexy Love: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUvYQqHaJulahGrU942ONQ

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