| Chuck Rudolph,
Slant magazine
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Leslie
Stefanson,
John Finn and Mark Pellegrino
Directed by: William Friedkin
Screenplay by: David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Run time: 94 min
Rating: R
Year: 2003
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Tommy Lee Jones has more or less built his career around roles as
authority figures--when he's not playing the psycho villain, he's
usually a cop, a lawyer, a soldier, or involved in a profession of
similar authority. In The Hunted, the intermittently gripping new
thriller from William Friedkin, Jones is back on familiar turf as L.T.
Bonham, an expert tracker and former instructor of Navy SEALs who is
called in to investigate a double-homicide that turns out to be the work
of Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), one of his trainees from several
years back. Hallam is prodigious when killing by knife--the film's
opening set piece shows him creeping into a mosque during the late-90s
civil war in Kosovo and executing a high-level Serbian general--and the
years of accumulated stress have broken down his mind to the point where
he can no longer separate the battlefield from the home front.
"Killing's easy," Bonham presciently warns his pupils in a
flashback. "Turning it off is the hard part."
The Hunted is a no-frills chase movie, muscular and lean at a
well-paced and barely indulgent 90 minutes. Once Bonham becomes involved
with assisting the Feds (led by Connie Nielsen, an unneeded, almost
distracting feminine presence) in bringing Hallam to justice, the film
begins slowly boiling away the excess fat of plot and character to their
eventual knifepoint duel. To that end, The Hunted is often most
effective when its characters are in motion. The film showcases two
exceptional fights between Bonham and Hallam; both achieve an incendiary
artlessness of movement and ferocity that is infrequently seen in
over-the-top, patently stagy movie combat. There's also an outstanding
chase sequence, no surprise from the filmmaker who redefined the movie
chase in his two best efforts, The French Connection and To Live and Die
in L.A. The surprise is that this time around the chase is conducted on
foot instead of in automobiles; here, the ghostly Hallam urgently tries
to evade Bonhamıs skills as a tracker through the streets and parks of
Portland, Oregon. If the car chase in L.A. was a masterpiece of
no-punches-pulled chaos, it is the delicacy and composure of this
sequence in The Hunted that makes it so satisfying.
Friedkin is a director who has taken his share of critical lumps over
the years, many deservedly so. But lost in the shuffle has been his
ability to tap into a purely physical consideration of masculinity, a
conceit at the forefront of The Hunted. Despite the filmıs generic plot
and characters, it makes a lot of smart choices when handling the
familiarity of its trappings. Instead of rehashing the mentor/prodigal
son archetype in the bond between Bonham and Hallam, the film suggests
that the two were never close beyond a familiar teacher/student
relationship, which ultimately emphasizes the abstract nature of their
combat and characterizes basic human impulses to fight, defend, and
kill. The film cuts out all suggestions of romantic softness--which
would have been a crime in a story this brutal--and better yet, it never
attempts to justify or explain away Hallam's state of mind and
subsequent violence, preferring to let his brutality speak
unapologetically for itself. This lends the film its definitive primal
element; the characters and their ensuing actions are conveyed in a
language that resides below the understanding and rationalization of
conventional communication, living in the fury of one's eyes or the
flick of one's knife blade.
The film's prevalent achievement is that it places Jones in a
familiar context but finds a different character for him to play. L.T.
Bonham might be after his fugitive, but he's no Sam Gerard. Jones's
performance here is a masterpiece of vulnerability, especially so when
placed in such a swift, grisly movie. The actor is a pro at playing
no-nonsense tough guys, but here he's gentle, almost timid; he even
twists many of the groan-worthy scenes he finds himself in (mostly
throwaway character bits opposite Nielsen) to serve as exploration of
Bonham's hesitancy and lifelong regrets through body language and subtly
revealing dialogue. Playing off of Del Toro, an actor who prefers to do
most of his talking without ever using his mouth, might have been the
key to his performance. Jones opens up and the characterıs compelling
jumble of intensity and frailty shines through even though it exists
primarily as background shading.
The Hunted, alas, doesn't quite make it to Jones's level -- there's a
lack of stability in the film as Friedkin alternates between
borderline-brilliant machismo and soapy filler. But in its handful of
principal moments the film compares favorably with the perceptive
lyricism of Walter Hill and Michael Mann, whose own brands of masculine
inquiry are usually encased in the action/adventure genre. The final
scene in the film achieves a commanding emotional dignity not only for
its implications about violence and human nature but also because of its
beautiful economy--told in only a few shots, it sums up more than most
films do in an hour. In these sporadically poetic glimpses, The Hunted
is a thrillingly vital movie.
Chuck Rudolph
İ slant magazine, 2003. |
