A satire about these extremely politically divided times that we live in — Red State vs. Blue State was
reportedly the title of an early version of the screenplay, actually — Universal’s The Hunt is now finally here, almost six months after it was originally scheduled to be released. As it turns out, the film is a blast when it’s at its best, and even when it’s not at its best, it’s still not much to get worked up about in terms of its political message. The Hunt swings big, but it’s much more a critique of hyper-partisanship on both sides than a condemnation of the views of either end of the spectrum.
Produced by Jason Blum through his Blumhouse Productions, written by Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, and directed by Craig Zobel, The Hunt takes the tried-and-true concept of “The Most Dangerous Game” and applies it to an exaggerated version of our fractured political landscape. This updated concept is the reason the movie was delayed half a year, shifted by the studio over concerns of its release being insensitive coming on the heels of the tragic, politically motivated mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso last August. In the conversation surrounding that shift, The Hunt was criticized in the media and, seemingly, by President Trump.
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But to take The Hunt on its premise alone is to miss the point, as it’s through-and-through a satire where hippie-dippy, woke, liberal caricatures compete with rhino-hunting, conspiracy-minded conservative distortions, and none of them are portrayed as being anything close to righteous. Where this war in our real world may have begun on the airwaves of cable news and has been fought largely from the relative safety of social media anonymity, The Hunt takes this splintered political dialogue to its ultimate, bloody, and ridiculous endpoint in the form of a human hunting expedition.
The Hunt is a difficult film to discuss without giving away some of its best surprises, but suffice to say the first act is a hilarious, gory humdinger that jerks the viewer around, pulling the rug out from under you just when you think you’re gaining your bearings. The filmmakers are playing with our expectations here, introducing familiar tropes — the square-jawed hero! The beautiful girl! The meet-cute amid the carnage! — but their very placement is meant as a diversionary tactic, not unlike the bait the hunters lay out for their intended victims. Meanwhile, the hunters quickly settle in as our antagonists as they hunt our identifying characters.
The set-up is simple: A “bunch of normal folks” (quote via the film’s trailer), all apparently of the Red State variety, are spirited against their will to a remote location where they are to be hunted down by a group of “liberal elites” (again, via the trailer), of course of the Blue State type. Familiar faces abound: Emma Roberts (American Horror Story), Justin Hartley (This Is Us), Betty Gilpin (GLOW), Ike Barinholtz (The Mindy Project), and so on. It doesn’t take long for the shooting to start and the aforementioned zig-zags to get underway, but eventually, things settle into a more normal narrative routine. And by then characters like Gilpin’s Crystal have proven compelling enough that you find you have a stake in this contest, despite how outrageous things can get.
Hilary Swank is also here, a corporate high-flyer who — again, in true social-media-age fashion — typed the wrong thing at the wrong time and hit send and has been paying for it ever since. Of course, that’s what The Hunt is really about: the way that the Internet and modern media, social and otherwise, have helped to create a bifurcated society of Us and Them, and one where the slightest misstep can lead to disaster. The Hunt, in many ways, is the ultimate example of how such a scenario — a stray tweet, a dredged-up aspect of one’s past, an inopportune joke gone wrong — can escalate to the point where it ruins a person’s life, or the lives of others. Were you an awful person before everyone online decided you were? Or did that arbitrary judgment become a self-fulfilling prophecy? It’s a chicken-or-egg nightmare that’s insane, zany, and horrific, as told here; but like any good genre film, is also deftly reflected back on us just enough to give one pause.
This could all very easily turn into just dumb caricatures and mindless splatter jokes, but The Hunt makes it work, in no small part due to the subdued yet kick-ass performance of Gilpin in particular. Her character’s quiet exhaustion and simmering anger not just at her involvement in the hunt, but also at her lot in life, is genuinely moving. The filmmakers know how to balance the inane fun of The Hunt’s crazy premise with a smart, stinging commentary about the world we live in.
The film does lose its step a bit in the final showdown, a problem which feels like it may hail from the realm of tacked-on reshoots. There, we learn that perhaps not everyone is what they at first seemed in this story, but the revelation only muddles the message. Is The Hunt telling us that we can transcend our petty and extreme viewpoints? Maybe it’s saying there’s more to us than just our online personas, and that there’s something to that whole “Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged” thing. Or maybe it’s just taking the easy way out by letting one of its characters off scot-free, separating them from the pack of irredeemable caricatures? It’s almost as if the filmmakers know that in the end someone has to win this most dangerous game, and they feel obligated to give us that person in as baggage-free a state as possible. But in pulling its punches like this, the film loses its edge. And if the point is that not everyone is Red or Blue and there are plenty of people just caught in the middle, The Hunt just doesn’t do enough to set that up.
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