The Hunt - Movie Review

Starring Hilary Swank, Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts, Ike Barinholtz, Ethan Suplee, Wayne Duvall, Amy Madigan, Glenn Howerton and Reed Birney.

Written by Nick Cuse & Damon Lindenof.

Directed by Craig Zobel.

★★½

This movie was supposed to come out in September 2019. After a mass shooting, it was delayed. It finally opened in March, and then the coronavirus outbreak meant it was crushed before enough people could see it. Should people see it?

Yeah, why not?

A group of stranger wake up in a field. They find an arsenal of weapons in the middle of said field. Feels very Hunger Games-ish, right? It turns out a group of rich weirdos are hunting “regular people” for sport. Or revenge? Who knows. The plot eventually reveals itself, and it doesn’t take too much time to do so. It’s a lean, mean 95 minutes of killing and mayhem.

The casting is clever. Let’s just say some characters I thought would be around a while are killed off pretty quickly. We don’t know who’s going to survive for the final showdown, or who exactly the main hero and main villain are until said showdown. I wish it had been a little more clever with its basic message, and yet I don’t want to give away spoilers on what its main message is. I will say that it has this red-state vs. blue-state mentality which I found gleefully subversive.

DVD Roundup - All Is Lost, The Spectacular Now, The Hunt

ALL IS LOST (★★★)
Starring Robert Redford. Directed by J.C. Chandor.

This bare-bones tale of survival never gets dull, even with very little dialogue and only one actor. Redford could be playing himself, but in this stripped down atmosphere, he's good enough. He's a man at sea when his boat springs a leak. For the next 80 minutes, it's just him trying to survive, trying to find a way to get another boat's attention before his own sinks.

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THE SPECTACULAR NOW (★★★½)
Starring Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyle Chandler and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Directed by James Ponsoldt.

It's one of those high school movies that actually has a brain and heart behind what it's doing. It's about a popular but listless bad boy named Sutter (Miles Teller), who falls for an unconventional nice girl (Shailene Woodley) who starts to be the better influence on him than he is a bad influence on her.

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THE HUNT (★★½)
Starring Mads Mikkelsen. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg.

This was a difficult movie to sit through, to the point that my wife quit watching and when I told her the rest of the movie, she said she has no regrets. This Danish film is about a good guy who volunteers at the kindergarten who is then accused of molesting one of the kids. We know right off the bat he is innocent, and so the increased tension from his home-town who start to view him as a monster... well, it's excruciating. Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, NBC's Hannibal) is very good as the wronged man, and it seems intended to remind of the cases of the McMartins, Friedmans, or West Memphis Three, where a Salem-esque hysteria surrounded the accused. It gets a little too manipulative in this vein, but Mikkelsen saves it.