THE HUNT

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND BAFFLEMENT

It's always nice when films try and do something a little different. I mean, I don't mind movies that dance familiar steps if they're danced well enough, but there is mileage to be gained from a new idea, or just an unexpected variation on the old one. Sadly, it does still have to make sense and in the case of this film's specific reversal on a very old and well-known theme, it doesn't actually hang together once you think about it.

The very old melody being played in The Hunt goes all the way back to The Most Dangerous Game and The Hounds Of Zaroff - rich bastards target poor slobs for sport, peasant rather than pheasant. A miscellaneous gathering of apparent randoms wake up in woodland and are almost immediately machine-gunned from a bunker further up the hill - but why? Turns out that this time the concept is given a political spin: it's left vs right, yeehaw rednecks vs wet lefty liberals, Reps vs Dems (though the parties and major figures are never actually named). Inevitably, the few survivors quickly realise they're going to have to man up very quickly...

The reversal, and the film's main problem, is that the predators are the smug lefty types and the victims are the rightwingers, which puts you in the position of rooting against the woker-than-woke and for the Magahatters. If one has to go back to that famous bit of Nietzsche - "he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster" - in the process of slaughtering a handful of "deplorables" the supposed nice guys actually end up as even more reprehensibly evil than their prey; throwing away the moral high ground by stooping to their level with a sneering "see how YOU like it". (Even then, the film cops out when it comes to actually having an overtly pro-Trump victor.)

The other reason I wrestled at length with the movie was that I wasn't sure how much of it was supposed to be a comedy. And I think I've concluded that it is substantially conceived as satirical, with most of the lefties portrayed as an insufferably right-on bunch of sitcom handwringing liberals worrying about misgendering, cultural appropriation and the high sugar content of soda, which only reminded me of that recent Tracey Ullman "Woke Support Group" sketch. That comedic tone sits strangely with the graphic eyeballs-and-entrails gore as well as the political aspects, making us wonder how seriously we're supposed to be taking this, and whether the makers know how seriously we're supposed to be taking this.

On the plus side, the early stages set up a few likely potential survivors before gleefully splattering them, leaving us unsure who to empathise with, and the final confrontation between the Last Woman Standing (Betty Gilpin) and the Number One Villain (Hilary Swank) is pleasingly vicious and violent. Postponed from its original release last August because of yet more mass shootings, it carries a bit of controversy with it but in the end it's absolutely nothing to get excited about, even while watching it. John Woo's Hard Target managed it all, social comment as well as crunchy violence, so much better.

**