“THE HUNT”: The great divide

Betty Gilpin (right)

Published March 12, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

“THE HUNT” My rating: C+ (Opens wide on March 13)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The premise of “The Hunt” —  a bunch of rich sphincters go hunting for other humans on a private game preserve — has been recycling through the cinema ever since 1932’s “The Most Dangerous Game.”

But this is the first time the hunters have been  elite libtards and their prey Trumpers.

Okay, okay. Step back and take a deep breath.

Craig Zobel’s film lets us know early on with a bombastic musical score that it isn’t meant to be taken too seriously.  Ditto for the laughably over-the-top violence.

Which is not to say that “The Hunt” doesn’t have some fairly serious subtext.  At its core it’s about how America’s deep political and social divisions are leading to self-destruction.

Mostly, though, the picture is played for thrills and yuks.

A dozen individuals awaken in a forest. Rubber gags have been locked onto their faces. They discover a large wooden crate containing a small arsenal of weapons and a key that opens their mouthpieces.

And then all hell breaks lose. These individuals — some played by familiar faces like Emma Roberts, Jake Barinholtz, and Justin Hartley (Kevin on TV’s “This is Us”) — must negotiate a dangerous landscape.  They may be shot with bullets and arrows, blown up by land mines, poisoned with dosed donuts or skewered in pits filled with sharpened wooden stakes.

Jake Barinholtz

A handful of these human targets manage to climb over a barbed wire fence and make their way to a country gas station where the ma-and-pa proprietors (Amy Madigan, Reed Birney) inform them that they are in Arkansas. (That’s a lie.)

Turns out that all of these individuals have contributed to right-wing web sites; apparently they were kidnapped and plopped down here in crazyland because of their  vitriolic postings.  One of them, played by Ethan Suplee, has pretty clearly been inspired by real-life conspiracy monger Alex Jones.

Anyway, after a good deal of misdirection Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s screenplay eventually settles on Crystal (Betty Gilpin, of Netflix’s “GLOW”), a steely-eyed War on Terror veteran who knows her way around weaponry and decides to take the battle to the wealthy pervs hunting her. Her body-strewn path leads to Athena (Hilary Swank), who helped create the games after her career was deep-sixed by ill-informed on-line trolls.

And through it all we get participants from both sides hurling accusations about the deep state, racism and other hot-button topics.

“The Hunt” — which was to have hit theaters last year but was held up by Universal after the mass shootings in California, Texas and Ohio — works best when it talks least.  The actions sequences are brutally satisfying and Gilpin is terrific as a woman who says little and acts decisively.

Things get dicey, though, when the film offers a backstory of how these bloody games came to be. The closer we get to understanding what’s going on, the less satisfying the experience.

| Robert W. Butler