The Hunt (2020)
The political drama of this film’s release somewhat overshadowed the political drama inherent in the film itself. It was supposed to have been released in the fall of 2019, but when conservative media, not to mention Trump, caught wind of the premise, there was a huge manufactured outcry which got the film shelved indefinitely. It was only when Covid struck and the cinemas closed that Blumhouse released it straight to VOD, skipping the theatres and skirting the drama.
So, why so much drama? The premise is that there’s a group of well-heeled, pretentious, hypocritically self-righteous, Hollywood liberal stereotypes who kidnap a group of closed-minded, mean-spirited, red-state conservative stereotypes, bring them to some remote location and hunt them for sport. It had seemed obvious back in ’19 that the outrage was pretty stupid as the liberals were the bad guys (or at least the only ones directly capturing and murdering people), but to be fair, the red hats aren’t presented in a terribly good light either.
One person, Betty Gilpin’s (of Glow) Crystal, stands out as not being a flat cultural stereotype and that’s why she’s the protagonist. She was taken by accident, mistaken for a different southerner whose mean tweets had set the whole story in motion. She’s some kind of combat veteran, and while she doesn’t seem to identify much with the ugly socio-political views of the group she’s been placed in, she also doesn’t identify with being hunted by a bunch of rich morons either. So, she kills everyone. Everyone. It’s pretty great.
The politics is facile, peddling an obvious kind of ‘plague o’ both your houses’ equivalence, but at the same time, there are some easy targets on both sides to make fun of, at least socially. But, it must be said that this is a really fun movie. Gilpin is just a pleasure, start to finish. The violence is enjoyably extreme. Some comedy lands. There is at least one stand out knife fight. I only felt that, given its brand of politically simple, everyone is terrible, satirical perspective, it was actually too well produced. I felt that this kind of crude making-fun-of-everybody would just work better as a Troma production (I mean, it directly reminds me of ‘Troma’s War’). Some messages are benefited by less money somehow.
But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it.