One star. Rated R, for relentless profanity, gore and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang
To coin a phrase — quite aptly, since a little porker figures in this grisly exercise in sadism — you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
The only thing worse than a gratuitously brutal horror flick, is one that attempts to “justify” its mayhem with a clunky political subtext.
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| Kidnapped and dumped in the wilderness for no apparent reason, a group of strangers — from left, "Staten Island" (Ike Barinholz, back to camera), "Trucker" (Justin Hartley), "Big Red" (Kate Nowlin), "Yoga Pants" (Emma Roberts) and Don (Wayne Duvall) — wonder what they're supposed to do with an armory of weapons. |
Rubbish is rubbish, no matter how it’s dressed.
In a better film, scripter Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s jabs at “elites” versus “deplorables” could have been suspenseful and uneasily relevant: a cheeky update of Richard Connell’s classic 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” most famously filmed in 1932 with Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks.
But director Craig Zobel’s horror-porn sensibilities are so gratuitously low-rent, that any semblance of social commentary is lost amid gore-laden blood, guts and entrails. Most of the so-called “characters” are too one-dimensional; the intended-to-be-astute remarks are too lame, obvious and random. This is filmmaking by arrested adolescents who enjoy pulling the wings off flies, and who delight in sharing the experience with us.
Let’s plunge in:
Eleven people, all with their mouths painfully collared, regain consciousness in random spots of a forest that surrounds an open meadow. They gradually assemble around a huge crate which, when opened, proves to contain a piglet in a T-shirt (don’t ask) and a weapons rack (a rather blatant swipe from The Hunger Games).
Alas, these hapless victims barely have time to contemplate whether they even know how to use such artillery, when they start getting picked off by explosive, high-powered rifle fire from a distant, well-stocked duck blind.
Not exactly sporting. Less “The Hunt,” and more “The Slaughter.”
Zobel and his scripters obviously enjoy toying with us, because in veryshort order, cinematographer Darran Tiernan’s systematic designation of such a film’s traditional survivors — the cute girl, the stalwart guy, etc. — is rent asunder. Within minutes, the group has been whittled down to just a few.
No surprise, since these poor souls aren’t even granted names, and instead are designated (but only in the press notes) as “Yoga Pants” (Emma Roberts), “Trucker” (Justin Hartley), “Big Red” (Kate Nowlin), “Vanilla Nice”(Sturgill Simpson) “Staten Island” (Ike Barinholtz) and “Dead Sexy” (Sylvia Grace Crim).
Considering what happens to the latter, her label is beyond offensive.
Most of these “characters” are nothing but meat for land mines, punji pits, steel-tipped arrows, shotguns and the aforementioned high-powered rifles.
They’re the “deplorables” — scruffy red-necks, conservatives, welfare recipients, anti-vaxxers, white trash, Second Amendment apologists, the under-educated, Flat Earthers, whatever — all of whom have been selected as fair game for the moneyed “elites” now targeting them for sport.
We’ve already met these so-called aristocrats: immaculately dressed, tree-hugging, PETA-sympathizing, NPR-quoting über-liberals introduced while traveling to the hunt in the comfort of a private jet, swilling champagne and dining on expensive snacks — “No caviar for me, please; I’d rather have figs” — and eagerly anticipating the fun to come. These snobbish folks are granted names: among others, Richard (Glenn Howerton), Martin (Dean J. West) and most notably their leader, Athena (Hilary Swank).
They squabble about race-sensitivity and other distortedly inane examples of political correctness, and when one of them gets up close and personal for a kill, he executes the coup de grâce while snarling “Climate change is real!”
(If all of this sounds juvenile and offensively crude, I applaud your good taste.)
Needless to say, these elites are the true deplorables here … but when the so-called “irony” is this heavy-handed, it hardly counts.
Given the haste with which most of our far more sympathetic victims are dispatched — in some cases, in a manner straight out of body-ripping zombie flicks — it quickly becomes obvious that we’ll get down to one, perhaps two individuals with the smarts and resourcefulness to fight back.
This film’s various trailers make it abundantly clear who that winds up being, but that detail won’t be revealed here. Not that this film deserves an avoidance of spoilers.
And just in case the core plot isn’t sufficiently crass and tawdry, the action takes a graceless second-act detour into a refugee camp along the Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina border: near where Athena and her cohorts set up their little playground, because “land was cheap.”
Yes: Cuse and Lindelof leave no inhumane stone unturned, in their desperately futile search for “dark satiric humor.”
In fairness, Swank is gleefully horrid as the unapologetically evil Athena; she definitely chews up the scenery, and clearly has a good time in these ghastly surroundings.
And the film concludes on its sole high note: an impressively brutal, no-holds-barred skirmish — in a well-appointed kitchen (!) — between the one remaining elite and the lone surviving deplorable. By this point, we’ve come to greatly admire the latter, and the individual portraying this role.
But that hardly excuses the crass excess endured to reach this point.
The Hunt originally was scheduled to debut last September 27, but Universal wisely postponed release in the wake of the previous August’s mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso. Why The Suits think things have changed since then is beyond me. It still feels irresponsible, but then — ultimately — there’s never been any limit to callous corporate indifference, when money is involved.
Do you really want to help Universal’s bottom line, by purchasing a ticket to this nauseating trash?
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