The Hunt (2020)

I note first that The Hunt is not that good, but I was attracted to it partly because of its principals and basic premise and partly because it has such a striking history of bad luck at this point. Directed by Craig Zobel (Compliance) and cowritten by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (between them Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, etc.), the story is out of "The Most Dangerous Game" crossed with "The Lottery," Lord of the Flies, and The Hunger Games¬—in short, unenlightened humans hunting humans for sport in a dystopian near-future time. (No one has yet done it like George Hitchcock.) The Hunt was originally scheduled for release in September 2019, but the studio got nervous after two days of mass shootings the previous month in El Paso and Dayton and postponed the release indefinitely. Then they decided March 13, 2020, would make a better release date. Well, you can't win 'em all, and now The Hunt has been well-buried by bad reviews too. I like the way the movie inverts the expectations of its social and political commentary, but that's about the only thing that's close to original about it. In this world, a group of random deplorables has been rounded up and they are being hunted by libtards on a mysterious estate that might be in Arkansas, Vermont, or Croatia. The story is somewhat muddled but comes down to a parable of self-fulfilling prophecy and being careful what you wish for. No one learns their lesson and the picture on the whole veers quite close to both-sidesing the issues it wants to address. The sendups of hypocrisy are equally lacerating toward deplorables and libtards and pretty much equally easy. The deplorables are gullible self-styled patriots while the libtards are both woke and shallow to painful degrees, corporate creatures who correct each other's language constantly in expensive clothes. Social media drives all conflict to levels of pitched hysteria. Everyone lives inside their phones. The Hunt is reasonably careful not to inflame vengeance passions, the mainstay of many action shows, but paradoxically that makes the action scenes here less satisfying and less interesting. And, not surprisingly, the action scenes dominate, with military-grade guns blazing, knives flying, and fancy hand-to-hand combat too. I liked director Zobel's Compliance because I thought it was basically a fair appraisal of deeply human traits not understood well until social psychology started looking closely. The Hunt is more like broad satire from the op-ed page (an Alexandra Petri column, say) or, worse, the tedious stupidity of social media back-and-forth. It's too real to be funny in this time of extraordinary tension, but humor is all it has to relieve the tension, so it just hits the obvious notes. Betty Gilpin is stand-up as the action hero and last man (/ woman / person / camera / TV, sorry didn't mean to use gendered language)—the last one left standing. But I wasn't really here to see a shoot-'em-up. Might be worth it for Lindelof and Zobel completists.