The Hunt is yet another tired adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game, a short story written by Richard Connell in 1924 and has been turned into motion pictures at least several dozen times (both officially and unofficially), starting with the 1932 film of the same name (which starred Fay Wray, who shot this film at night on the very same jungle sets where she shot King Kong during the day) and including the very silly (but still vastly entertaining) Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity in 1987. The basic story is that of a famous hunter who, growing bored with animals, decides to hunt humans for sport on his private island, instead.
The Hunt is a variation of this theme, where a group of people are kidnapped and brought to the private hunting grounds belonging to wealthy elites who hunt them for sport. But for some strange reason, the people being hunted are given working guns and other assorted weapons--which was something that not even the hunter in the original Dangerous Game did. Granted, in the ‘32 film, the hunter gave his human prey a knife, but the hunter still had the advantage by hunting his prey with a gun. Despite the fact that the hunter in the original story was a psychopath, he still wasn’t stupid--unlike the rich hunters who populate The Hunt, which turns out to be a pretty insipid and dumb flick.
The basic problem is that The Hunt tries too hard to be edgy and darkly satirical by framing its take on this tale with the polarizing politics of the day. The elites who are hunting these poor folk are rich liberals! The people being hunted are conservatives who are all gun lovers--which is all the more reason why their hunters probably shouldn’t arm these folks with guns in the first place, right? But never mind creating a sensible story, The Hunt desperately wants to be ‘smart’ without actually working for it. It wants you to believe that a group of billionaires--people with way too much to lose--would risk their own lives for what’s basically a game of revenge.
These wealthy people can seriously fuck up the lives of their victims by just making a phone call, but instead they risk getting killed by their well-armed victims, which seems very silly from the outset. What makes it worse is that the dipshit script presents everyone as being a one-dimensional cartoon character who sprout the usual platitudes that you would expect to hear from their political side. And the script, which must have been written in crayon, also tries to have so many plot twists that it reduces its characters to acting like idiots just so they can adhere to every dopey plot beat. The end result is a stupid, drawn-out ‘mano y mano’ battle between the two leads.
But one of the leads is actually very good. Crystal, the heroine, is played by Betty Gilpin, and she’s great, here. I was already a fan of Gilpin from Netflix’s GLOW, and her presence in this flick was the main reason why I wanted to see it. Gilpin manages to rise above the material she’s given by creating a weirdly interesting character whom you can’t help but root for. If only she was given better villains who had a more plausible motivation, or just a better script, overall. The Hunt tries so hard to be a crackling, insightful commentary on our present state of affairs, but it’s just nothing more than another air-headed dud that settles for cheap thrills. --SF
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