Film Preview

An action film aspiring to psychoanalytic significance, The Hunted—the latest from The Exorcist director William Friedkin—begins with a quote from the Bible, as interpreted by Bob Dylan: “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’” The plot follows accordingly, setting peace-loving L.T. Hallam (a mountain man reminiscent of Jack London, played by Tommy Lee Jones) on the trail of Aaron Hallam (Benicio del Toro), when the latter—a Special Forces superman scarred by his service in Kosovo—goes on a killing rampage in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Violently stabbing and dissecting his victims, Hallam is motivated by “war stress” tinged with a strange sort of militant vegetarianism (“Do you know that 5 billion chickens will be slaughtered this year?” he asks an FBI investigator). L.T., Hallam’s former teacher in hand-to-hand combat, is of course the only man fit to intervene.

While The Hunted does succeed in being unusually beautiful, thanks to the cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, the film gives away its plot far too early to allow for an intelligent resolution of the Oedipal conflict set up in the opening scenes. The teacher-student/father-son conflict quickly evaporates into a series of increasingly improbable chase sequences in cars, sewers, rivers, trains and city streets. This is an action film, after all—not a philosophical puzzler pitched at Freudian intellects.

Nevertheless, Oedipal conflict certainly plays a role in the subtext of the film. Hallam’s spooky taunting of his victims, hunters who search for deer with high powered scopes, applies as much to Friedkin’s directorial predecessors as to the trigger-happy “businessmen from Medford” who become Hallam’s first victims: “There’s no reverence in what you do.”

Directorial one-upmanship and the censure of Friedkin’s predecessors for an overreliance on technology in action films perhaps lie behind such comments. Although moral lines become fuzzy within the film, the meta-filmic lines of combat stay fairly stable: Friedkin lives up to his goal, producing a nauseatingly violent action film without any key high-tech, high-caliber sequences.

In fact, the director may have been a little too true to his goals. While preparing for the film’s climactic one-on-one knife fight in one of The Hunted particularly confusing scenes, Hallam and L.T. independently carve makeshift weapons out of scrap metal and stone, despite the fact that they’re within walking distance of downtown Portland. Even modern primitives should know better than to do-it-yourself when there’s a Wal-Mart nearby.

Aside from occasional excesses (which are, perhaps, simply inherent in the genre of action film), what results from Friedkin’s attempt at violence-without-bullets is an amalgamation of Saving Private Ryan, The Fugitive and a 1980s slasher movie: historical context, Tommy Lee on the tail of the bad guy and blood and guts squirting all over the place.

For fans of action films, The Hunted will provide a refreshing break from the usual means of slicing-and-dicing, without doing away with any of the high-adrenaline pyrotechnics of special effects-heavy films. For non-fans, it’s a thin attempt at intellectualized violence bearing all the pitfalls of the action genre: loose ends, latent misogyny, narrative predictability and “novelty” realized only through increased goriness. The Hunted aims for haute couture and ends up with stoned soup: all the familiar leftovers, beaten, bloody and bland. —Ashley Aull

The Hunted screens at Loews Fresh Pond at 12, 2:20, 4:45, 7:10 and 9:50 p.m.