The Hunted

3/15/03 - Review

What happens when trained killers become a menace to the civilized World?  All hell breaks lose.  Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro star opposite each other as a mentor who is trying to track down his former student who has killed four innocent civilians. 

The movie starts out in Kosovo, Bosnia in the year 1999 where we see Aaron Hallam (Toro) single handedly killing a Serbian Commander.  As this War was taking place, Hallam witnessed many horrific acts of murder and genocide which in turn caused him to “lose it.”  His years of military brutality and murder have finally caught up with him as he cannot “turn off” the skills he has learned.  Hallam ends up going MIA and soon starts killing innocent hunters who he claims are slaughtering animals for pleasure.  The authorities and the FBI cannot track him because of his survival skills which he had learned from his former mentor. 

The only man that can track him down is none other than L.T. Bonham (Jones).  We were led to believe that he was in the Army because of the L.T. but it turned out that he never was a soldier.  He worked for the military, training men like Hallam to survive and kill. Bonham is requested to leave his British Columbian home and come to the city and catch his former pupil. 

Bonham is joined by Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen) of the FBI who lends a helping hand.  But Bonham knows that as he constantly chases after Hallam it will come down to both of them squaring off.  One of them will die in the confrontation and Hollam knows it which makes it even harder for him since he has never killed anyone in his life. 

The Hunted was an average movie at best.  I have to admit though that I really enjoyed all of the fight scenes in the movie.  Most of the action sequences consisted of knives and hand to hand combat.  It is good to see a movie that doesn’t rely on the effects of guns and other explosives.  The director did a great job choreographing all of the fight scenes.  They were all a real treat to watch especially when Benicio’s character was always sneaking around in the forest and the shadows only showing himself long enough to get the kill. 

Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro were the highlights of the movie.  Both of them portrayed their respective character with utmost control and believable even though Jones was stretching it a bit as a bad ass fighter.  Its now wonder that they have won Academy Awards.  Other than that this movie has nothing else to boast about.

The rest of the cast does nothing to forward this movie.  They are used sparingly so we don’t really get to learn anything about them or what their purpose is, especially Benicio Del Toro’s so called family.  They had five minutes of screen time in the middle but never showed up again.  The same is true for the rest of the cast with Connie Nielsen as the only one with a decent, albeit little amount of screen time.  The main characters are Jones and Toro so I guess no one else matters.

I also thought the story was weak especially in the timeline.  The movie progresses so fast that we do not know what happened in between scenes and why.  I can see why Hallam is the way he is but I don’t know why he kills the innocent people.  The reasoning that Hallam gives in the movie is pathetic and unbelievable.  If he is an emotionless character, then how can he care for the family?  At that point it is hard to believe that he can slit someone’s throat with a flick of the wrist.  As fast as the movie went along, it ended just as fast without really any closure. 

Jones and Toro tried their hardest to carry the movie but it came up short anyway.  It is a shame too that talent like this didn’t have a better script.  Their performances were good but the rest wasn’t.  At least there was some good knife-play.

Grade

What do you think?