In the summer of last year, the first trailer for The Hunt dropped and I was instantly hooked on the idea. I have always had an interest in the concept since reading “The Most Dangerous Game” for the first time in middle school and I have been entertained by its various iterations on screen. But the idea of conservatives being picked off by elitist liberals didn’t sit well with the conservative crowd and so the film was shelved, seemingly never to be released.
But it’s politics season and is there a better time to highlight the political divide than right in the middle of an election year? Or is that even what The Hunt truly is trying to do and we’ve been misled all this time?
The Hunt, for those of you that never saw the trailers or weren’t able to hear about it from your favorite news source, is about a group of strangers that wake up to find themselves in the middle of a field with little to no memory of how they even got to be there. They are gagged, tagged and next to them is a giant wooden crate full of weapons. The goal? Survive.
As the group begins to catch on to the game that is clearly afoot, some are wasted quickly while others are more resourceful. They don’t know why they are in the situation that they are in, and neither does the audience, but certain things start to make themselves more and more apparent as the game goes on and the characters learn who they can and cannot trust. The main character of this group, Crystal (Betty Gilpin) is a clear standout survivor and she goes rip-roaring looking for any and all ways to survive this most dangerous game.
It’s interesting to see the political backlash that The Hunt gets because the social commentary is hardly political, if political at all. Sure, there’s the use of hot button words like “Deplorables” and mentions of an unspecified President in less-than-favorable terms, but the film is more interested in criticizing the way we talk to each other both in-person and online and satirizing the idea of “what if a keyboard warrior had to actually fight?” It looks at the idea of “what if someone took online criticism to the absolute max?”
Gilpin dominates the screen. She is fun to watch, has a ton of charisma and her character is a blast. The Hunt is very violent and doesn’t pull any punches, but it is just as funny as it is violent. In fact, it is far funnier than I expected it to be, which is a smart move because the way the premise plays out would actually not work as well as it does had the movie played things as straight as something like 1994’s Surviving the Game did. In fact, there are moments where things are so ridiculous you wonder if this is all just going to end with “and it was all a dream!”
So what is the film trying to say about the divide between Democrats and Republicans? To be honest, since I know that there are many out there who may avoid this film because of the initial marketing campaign, it’s worth mentioning that the film hardly revolves around the idea.
The film definitely parodies the various characters that we see on our social media accounts and throws them into the given situation to various effects: there’s the conspiracy theorist, the “I don’t have time for politics” person, the person to lumps all Democrats into one bucket, the person who lumps all Republicans into one bucket, and of course, there’s the stereotypical Boomer who “say something about this on Facebook.”
While The Hunt definitely goes for more action and laughs than social commentary, its questions about the way that we communicate, disagree and cast judgments both in-person and online can definitely transcend the film and apply to our current political climate. It has its surprises and I honestly had a great time watching it for what it was–a movie with a ridiculous premise that isn’t trying to end or contribute to any kind of political discussion, it’s just trying to be a satirical distraction from it all.
RATING: C
