The Hunted

1.5/4

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielson

Rated R for Strong Bloody Violence, and Some Language

“To get to the other side.”

That’s the punchline to the world’s lamest joke, but it’s also an apt descriptor for “The Hunted,” an irredeemably bad thriller.  It’s all payoff and no set up.

LT Bonham (Jones) was a consultant to the US Army, teaching soldiers tracking techniques and turning them into superior killing machines.  Now, one of his former students, Aaron Hallam (del Toro) has gone rogue and is killing everyone he comes into contact with.  Now Bonham must catch him to keep the body count from rising any higher.

In order for a thriller to succeed, it needs to set the stage.  It needs to introduce us to the characters and set up the plot.  “The Hunted” doesn’t do that.  It jumps right in as if it starts in the middle of the movie and just keeps going.  We aren’t given anyone to care about because there aren’t any characters or situations.  There’s not even a script, really (the amount of dialogue spoken is very low).

Adding insult to injury is the cliché where every cop has to be dumb.  That may work for “Die Hard,” when there’s a lot at stake and a person may feel more comfortable with procedure, but these guys make the morons who populated slasher movies look like geniuses.  For example, there is one scene where LT is trying to get the cops to let him go after Aaron himself instead of sending more cops to be slaughtered.  Instead of listening to the guy who trained the guy, they go “buddy cop” on him, saying that the dead cops were theirs, “the best I’ve ever worked with” and all that jazz, so they want to take him down themselves.  Or take the previous scene where a cop has to walk right up to a body before he realizes it’s dead (and is then killed himself), and a moment after that, another cop does the exact same thing!  Then there’s an obvious plot gaffe where one character gets a stick through his thigh and is bounced down a waterfall, and walks away without a limp for one scene (with a visible blood splotch but not ripped pants), then has it for the next scene.  What?

It doesn’t stop there.  There are a number of scenes where LT inexplicably realizes that Aaron is in the house, so he finds him, they talk, the cops burst in, Aaron escapes, and the chase is on.  This sequence of events (which is repeated at least twice), takes up the second quarter of the movie.

The performances are fine, but there’s little that any of these performers can do since they have nothing to work with.  Tommy Lee Jones is quite good under the circumstances, playing a character that ventures slightly out of his comfort zone.  Benicio del Toro isn’t particularly creepy as Hallam, but that’s not really his fault, since he is given almost no material.  And Connie Nielson is a whole lot less annoying than she was in her stint on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” but she’s still miscast.

With three Oscar winners and a $55 million budget, it’s hard to understand why this movie ended up misfiring so badly.  What were they thinking when they okayed this script?  There is nothing there.  The film is stylishly done and with a little effort put into the script, it could have been a real winner.  But it ends up being a colossal disappointment.