Deplorables on both sides

 THE HUNT (2020)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"The Hunt" was almost released in theaters until there were a couple of tragic mass shooting sprees in America that brought it to a halt. Then COVID hit and it hampered any chances of the film finding an audience. "The Hunt" is a movie that seems to aim high as political satire and ends up as pure sludge with copious pools of blood. Its intelligence is only hinted for an alleged satire that could've shifted the Earth's axis and shook things up. 

The movie revs up its carnage-fueled engine almost immediately, so immediate in fact that there is no time to figure out what is happening. A cargo plane is full of young lefties joking back and forth and drinking champagne until someone approaches them from a deep sleep and can't speak. The guy is killed with a stab in the neck and his eyeball plucked! Then we get to some wilderness area where people wake up and have mouth guards on. A wooden crate in the middle of an open space houses a dressed pig and several weapons including assault rifles and knives ("Hunger Games," anyone? No, actually a sly update of Orwell's "Animal Farm").  But before we have a chance to know the unsuspecting lot of hunted victims, shots ring out and kill almost all of them including such uses of not just a hidden impalement trap but also grenades blowing people apart, etc. This whole movie is on kill or be killed overdrive.

Two survivors find each other, and one of them is Crystal (Betty Gilpin), a woman who worked at a car rental agency and was kidnapped and sent to Arkansas. Oh, wait a minute, it is actually Croatia and a gas station owned by none other than Amy Madigan and Reed Birney is anything but. The other survivor is a right wing podcaster (Ethan Suplee, who is always good for a few laughs) and they have no idea what fresh Croatian hell this is except no one can be trusted. Crystal has military experience in Afghanistan and is quite handy with a gun and hand-to-hand combat. 

"The Hunt" aims to be political and uses relatively colorful stereotypes but everything is really on the surface and nothing more. There are right-wing nuts who elicit nothing more than one-dimensional thoughts about illegal immigration, crisis actors (that gave me a big laugh, courtesy of Suplee) and not a heck of a lot more than that. The leftists are spearheaded into this wild murderous spree by a CEO of some unnamed company, Athena (Hilary Swank, a truly cold-blooded villain with a touch of elegance), and it is about simply killing the "deplorables" and frankly there is not much more substance than that. The movie suggests that "Manorgate" is a social media conspiracy theory whose origin was based on a group joke text. This means these guys, sorry these men and women, are not really interested in killing deplorables yet go through with it anyway. If the idea of murder was just a joke yet they go ahead and kill, maim and destroy the deplorables, then "The Hunt" is really saying that these leftists are truly deplorable and far more violent than any right-wing nut. It's nihilism and gory executions passing itself off as satire with Betty Gilpin's apolitical Crystal as some sort of relentless fighting machine that would've made Uma Thurman's Beatrix Kiddo a little scared. 

"The Hunt" is watchable and commands attention though the overdone, grisly cartoonishness of its murders becomes a tad tedious. This movie has a definite visceral charge but not an intellectual one. Call it pseudo-intellectual politicking with only a high body count on its mind.