The Hunt

I'm pretty convinced that the scariest word of the 21st century will be 'satire'. There are bad scripts, and then there are scripts that are also bad but try to convince us that they are not by pointing out how aware they are of the genre rules they are not afraid to knowingly break. When you then combine this insufferable arrogance with an ironic statement about contemporary society, you'd have to be a real genius to get anything out of it other than a painfully spasmodic rant where even the script must have been written on Twitter, complete with hashtags. And it's probably not worth mentioning that Zobel is no genius. Aside from the final, surprisingly well done and distinctive fight scenes, it's mind-numbingly boringly shot in a typical Blumhouse production where everyone is wearing clean pressed clothes, the set is full of obviously artificial objects, and when he tries to shock, he does it with the aid of laughably digital blood. Lindelof is a filmmaker who based his entire screenwriting career on trying to emulate Joss Whedon, the king of bullshit genre self-reflections (God how I hate them), but didn't have enough talent to pull it off. Now he's just trying to make a buck off of the social and cultural internet wars, where he's trying to prove his ability to balance on a spectrum of opinion that’s pathetic. Plus, when you subtract the context from the film, notice how each scene is completely nonsensically constructed, how people behave in it, and what moves the plot along. This movie is sloppy AF. Too bad for Betty Gilpin, who the whole time gives the impression of either not being able to believe what just came out of her mouth or that somebody else is strung up in her face. She's actually quite funny when it comes to that. Like, for real. (08/22/2020)

I have no idea why horror is listed as one of the film's genres. Black comedy fits much better. Anyway, I had fun while wading through all that blood, and I don't care what it says about me. After all, when the Americans are able to make fun of all their taboo topics once every ten years, I’m ecstatic about how different it is from the constantly celebrated patriotism, riding on a giant wave of pathos. What's more, I loved Crystal’s approach, and I still have to think about how frustrating it must be when you're talking to someone whose head (or at least a substantial part of it) is gone all of a sudden. The film definitely deserves to have a higher rating. (05/30/2020)

The Hunt is cross-genre bullshit that aims to please by going against the grain, but it ends up being just an action-revenge B-movie with comical brutality. However, the actress in the lead role is uniquely atypical. The most typical genre characters deliberately come in with a roar in the first few minutes so that the film is surprising in its exposition, setting the viewer up for a fresh experience, which may or may not suit you. (07/29/2020)

The Hunt is an interesting but not original film. It will be a hit with Hunger Games fans. At the beginning of the film, twelve people are kidnapped and wake up in an unknown location. The hunt begins. The first half of the film is highly dramatic and it is not clear to the viewer who the main character is and who the actual killers are. The second half of the film is weaker. Here the filmmakers have abandoned the dark atmosphere of the forest and moved into enclosed spaces. The story is not complicated and does not contain any major twists. There are rather unfamiliar faces in the film, but they play their roles very well. As far as the action scenes are concerned, they are professionally handled and one can see that a lot of work has been done on them. An average film that is perfect to watch when bored. (06/12/2023)

I hate movies where the director sits there in awe and says that everyone on the screen is a moron and that's why we're going to laugh at them. This isn't smart satire, it's the movie version of a Facebook discussion with conservatives and liberals arguing; all the smart people have left and now someone comes along and feels they have to tell the rest they're morons. By the way, besides the final fight, it's pretty uninteresting. (04/02/2020)