Review: THE HUNT

One of the cardinal rules of film criticism - even for bedroom-guitarist critics like me - is NEVER to damn a film for what it isn't. This is distinct from saying a comedy isn't funny or a horror movie isn't scary; that's just calling them out for not doing their jobs. No, whingeing about the absence of whatever it is about the film in front of you means that you are not describing that film. It is invalid as criticism. My distaste for Wes Anderson's films can never come from a wish that they were less twee/what they are. So, when I spoil this review right now by telling you how little I like The Hunt it is entirely based on what I saw between its credit sequences. While that's only right it's really bugging me because I'm straining against comparing it to another film. Let's see how I do.

A woman in luxury is texting with a friend who mentions the weekend's hard core fun when they'll bag a few "deplorables". Cut to a flight in a private jet filled with arrogant one-percenters. Suddenly an oafish passenger starts panicking and is subdued with eye-popping violence. Cut to lush green pastures where a group of industrially gagged people find each other but get popped off by grenades, bullets and arrows. They disperse for their lives. The hunt is on.

From this point there be spoilers so that's all the plot you're going to get here. However, you'll already have understood that it's about highly-placed liberals picking off rednecks in exactly the kind of fashion that hard-right privilege might be depicted. So people are bad all over at all levels? Not quite. This film, for its sins, does at least have some cards up its sleeve with some genuinely clever twists. So, does it work as satire?

Well, once you get over the opening twist of liberals becoming the same monsters they deplore you need somewhere to go before it just becomes an overstretched SNL skit. So, into the mix comes Manorgate, the right wing rumour come true. That's still good satire and it's still funny. But while there are pot shots aplenty at conspiracy thinking an imbalance emerges as the film itself starts to take sides. It has to do this if it wants to engage us but the way it does it starts feeling sleazy quickly.

While the hillbillies-with-modems jokes are developed to be broad here and subtle there every self-correcting liberal joke ends up as a grating replay political correctness. This means that the self-styled disenfranchised lower orders gain a little dignity and their delusional paranoia a symptom of political impotence and information poverty. It also suggests that only the comfort of extreme privilege can allow compassionate thinking which just ends up as cavernously hollow rhetoric.

The emergent protagonist (there are some funny red herrings early on with this issue) can be seen as apolitical or at best political by experience. This is necessary for the narrative alone as it keeps her struggle clean. And then in the inevitable showdown when the opposing forces are reduced to their convictions you get the big ironic reveal. It's delivered in a line of foreshadowed dialogue and it works. But, then, after the big battle and the elegant coda you realise that it doesn't. If the issue is about a misapprehension it still led to a group of leopards changing their spots. So, is everyone, high or low, left or right, really just this venal and homicidal? Is there a point, then? Even the most flamboyant or cardboard thin satire must work within its own structure. It's the comedy not being funny thing: this satire hoists itself on its own petar.

It's slick. It's bold. It's action packed and engaging. It just can't convince me that it isn't just constantly dissing me. This time, that's not a compliment. This film professes an even hand with its players but when the underdogs are actually underdogs regardless of their imagined influence and the overlords are just their real life opponents in disguise the resulting irony is just loud and lazy and, finally just self-defeating. That characters can discuss George Orwell at a moment of crisis is a writer's wink and it comes from the sort of person who wouldn't use air quotes when intoning the term "snowflake". Cynics feel entitled to be considered wise. If you consider cynicism indistinguishable from wisdom then have I got a movie for you.


PS - And I didn't have to make that comparison after all that.

The Hunt is available on Apple Movies/iTunes for the price of a full cinema ticket, not the more usual seven or eight dollars of a new release. Be aware of that.