943 words
Jason Blum and Craig Zobel’s The Hunt received mixed reviews regarding its sensational plot, where a group of rich corporate types kidnaps Americans — “deplorable” rednecks — to hunt them down.
The Most Dangerous Game, the 1931 adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same name, is the original source of the “people hunting other people” concept. For example, The Lost Patrol (1935) features a group of soldiers getting picked off one by one until a lone survivor triumphs. The previous incarnation of this trope was Alien. The Hunt, despite all the howls from the Right, is a sharp, funny satire of the culture war, as well as an entertaining depiction of where we are in the red/blue divide.
After a nasty intro on a swanky jetliner, the aforementioned “deplorables” find themselves in a rural field with their mouths gagged (a foretaste of our population being masked). As they work to get the gags loose, they warily bond with each other. One is a conservative radio DJ, another a nurse, another an older veteran. But one woman, Crystal (Betty Gilpin), keeps her distance. She is a little more wary, eyes sharp as she studies the terrain, preparing. . . for what?
Crystal barely offers thanks for help getting her gag loose. Large crates stand before the group. Inside are weapons they must take if they are to survive.
A pig trots out from one of the crates, wearing clothes. As the piggy oinks, shots pop off, and one by one, the people are blown away. The action is fast and brutal, with quick camera shots and good spacing. The deplorables scramble into the woods.
They try to escape, but to where? Can they trust who is beside them? Booby traps and snipers take their toll, and they straggle to a country store.
The survivors appeal to the store’s owners, a kindly old couple. But the couple are hunters, too. They wipe the survivors out, then start bickering about being environmentally conscious. The PC patter is delivered in soft, fussy tones: AARP meets MSNBC.
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Crystal, who has been hanging back from the rest, enters the store. The kindly couple prepares to end this year’s hunt, reaching for a shotgun beneath the counter, but Crystal turns the tables on them. The store’s owners tell Crystal they’re in Arkansas, but Crystal catches them in their lie over the price of a pack of cigarettes. With the shopkeepers caught off guard, Crystal has the advantage of surprise.
Crystal meets with a couple of survivors, revealing that she was a soldier in the Gulf War. They try to escape, discovering they’re a very long way from Arkansas (or Kansas, for that matter). Crystal repeatedly outsmarts her would-be killers. They were expecting a pig for slaughter, and got a wild boar instead.
The survivors argue about who their pursuers are. Crystal shrugs as she checks her weapon: “We got to figure if they’re idiots trying to be smart people, or smart people trying to be idiots.”
Crystal tracks the remaining hunters down to a cushy bunker, and it’s funny to hear their PC chatter. They’re never caricatures, but fussy and catty, as if the cast of Seinfeld joined the Taliban. Crystal gets the drop on them and pulls a Josey Wales.
This leads her to Athena, their leader (Hilary Swank), who has been absent from the film except in the first bloody scene on the jetliner. She prepares gourmet grilled cheese, then amidst a yuppie repast of said grilled cheese, good wine, and tasteful, ethical vegetables (with no ketchup), she and Crystal kick, punch, slash, and wail on each other as they exchange worldviews.
It seems the hunters chose Crystal by mistake. The Crystal the hunters wanted was a housewife who signed a conservative petition, not GI Jane.
During the fight, Athena admits she organized these hunts because she had been blacklisted in New York by her firm for a politically incorrect tweet. This is her revenge on deplorables, whom she blames for her expulsion from the good life.
Crystal gets her revenge, then binds her wounds and munches on grilled cheese.
The Hunt expresses political anger and class outrage in the well-fitting clothes of a B action movie. The various pigs in the film reference Animal Farm, and the film satirizes civil war. The yuppies who do the killing are wusses trained by an ex-military type. They do pretty well until the wild card that is Crystal comes on the scene. The flabby, unprepared conservatives are chopped up, as the yuppies eventually are by Crystal, showing that both red and blue people are amateurs who will be offed in a real struggle before the real killers take over: in this case, a cold-blooded corporate femme fatale versus a redneck ex-soldier.
Crystal and Athena’s catfight is a nod to present cinematic and graphic novel conventions — the “designated girl fight” — but it isn’t without its humor and insights about going for the jugular.
I liked The Hunt more than I thought I would, and appreciate the satire mixed with 88 minutes of quick action. It was fun to watch, and don’t forget about the pigs. The film is definitely worth a view.
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9 comments
Sounds interesting. Will watch. The gags represent the deplatforming maybe.
Steve sailer said he thought hunger games was vapid, but I thought it had clear subtext about the neocon wars of the aughts, and similar to this movie. The victims are almost exclusively young whites from the lower classes of society. They might represent the Appalachian proles whose job prospects have been offshored (hence the hunger). The elites who run the government or the show or whatever(I’m not so familiar with it as to know the lore) are these diversified characters with over the top ridiculous hairstyles and fashions, much like the diverse elite the current American elite would like to see.(all serving a very particular interest of course, not diverse in that at all!).
The Games are the middle eastern neocon wars that the proles must enlist in just to make economic ends meet and survive in their impoverished manufacturing base. The middle eastern wars were a great spectacle, the more so if one has a deep spiritual hatred of the people we are attacking over there. Many reservists were deployed for indefinite tours back in the aughts, if you recall.
I admit I never read the hunger games books—they seem written at a level below Twilight and sort of half watched the movies. What do you guys think? Is this perhaps what the author had in mind, or is it really vapid and empty of meaning as Steve alleged?
Yeah, I remember all the normie-con kvetching when this film first got announced and being surprised at how misplaced it was. The manhunt theme universally portrays the hunters as the villains, which were yuppies and coastal elites in this case.
Somewhat disconcerting, more than a couple of figures in our own milieu adopted the normie-con points. I guess you could interpret the film as an attempt to transform the sub-genre into a revenge porn fantasy in the wake of Trump, but the tropes associated with the genre — evil rich hunting the hapless poor — are so well established in the public consciousness that barely anyone would give it another reading. This makes it hard to believe that even the most witless of producers will intend to present it otherwise.
Dormir-cons don’t understand the basic conventions of the horror genre.
I just watched the movie, (easily accessible on 1337x [dot] to) and I see where they were trying to take the template. Steven Clark’s review is right on the money.
The film reminded me of Mike Leigh’s “High Hopes” — “the characters are caricatures of what the lower classes imagine the upper classes to be and what the upper classes view poor people to be like” — only dressed up as a butcher-happy B movie.
It’s ridiculously on the nose, even more so than the present review lets on (let on for me, at least). Guess audiences got dumber since Leigh’s time.
Anyway, a fun watch.
Maybe I’ll check it out soon. When the media and political propaganda about this silly little film was in full swing, I tuned that out. And also tuned out any thoughts about seeing this movie. Similarly there was the media inspired idea that there was something wrong with “First Man” and upon seeing it, I understand what the left’s problem was. The movie didn’t pander one iota to black equity grievance and it depicts both White Men and The United States of America in a most excellent light.
Crystal had the right attitude to survive, why should she have trusted her fellow prisoners when their true motives were unclear–the jews destroyed racial loyalty, and white communities years ago. I especially agreed with her contemporized “The Jack Rabbit and The Box Turtle” fable, and I think that is the type of story white children should be reading to prepare them for this jewish hell-hole.
Crystal was a great character. She did her service to the country and took from it what she could in top notch training for survival. It is also disconcerting how often the elites on the coasts show there disdain for anyone that has served the country and preserved their ultimate freedoms to thrive. The portrayal of Athena doing her best to pass the buck to Crystal was priceless. That Crystal was able to make it through it all and maintain her wits was great. She read Animal Farm. Correctly identified who the real Snowball was. I thoroughly enjoyed the film.
Thanks for reviewing The Hunt. I enjoyed the film. Good clean satire and violence. What more could you want?
I watched it yesterday and it was hilarious. The PC`s were shown to be hypocrites of the worst degree – just like in real life.
Guns are icky – they use guns to kill
Protect the enviroment – use explosives and poison gas
We have to give criminals a second, third etc chance – one rightwing tweet and you are unredeemable and must be killed
The scene were those PC people talked among themselves with appropiation or the scene were the victims were selected – We have to have at least one of each race – glorious! At first my jaw dropped and then the laughter started.
What they missed: Using a plane is so polluting the enviroment
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