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The Hunted — 4K

by Glenn Erickson Dec 21, 2024

William Friedkin whips up some terrific action and nasty knife-fighting with solid input from Tommy Lee Jones and Benecio Del Toro. Despite delivering on the promise of action, the characters and storyline never rise above trite clichés. So this one’s for fans of hairy chases and gritty one-on-one combat. Friedkin’s fast-paced action is enhanced with the cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, which looks better than ever in a new 4K remaster.


The Hunted 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
2003 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic / 94 min. / Street Date November 26, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Leslie Stefanson, John Finn, Ron Canada, Zoran Radanovich, Lonny Chapman.
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Production Designer: William Cruse
Art Director: Beatriz Kerti
Costume design: Gloria Gresham
Film Editor: Augie Hess
Tracker Technical advisor: John Brown, Jr.
Knife fight choreographers: Rafael Kayanan, Thomas Kier
Original Music: Johnny Cash, Brian Tyler
Written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffith, Art Monterastelli
Executive Producers: Sean Daniel, David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, Marcus Viscidi.
Produced by James Jacks, Ricardo Mestres, Art Monterastelli
Directed by
William Friedkin

So much of today’s scripted TV entertainment is neck-deep in guns: law enforcement organizations and special military investigators now crowd the airwaves with stories packed with gun violence. Heroes and villains are all ex-soldiers, if not ex-snipers or trained specialists in exotic killing. It’s a little depressing. So many shows feature gun-to-the-head threats and ‘Mexican standoff’ situations.  Things are more gun crazy than the days of TV’s  Gunsmoke, in which every simple dispute in a tiny town had to be resolved with a shoot-out on Main Street.

Are we losing our affection for violent entertainment?  Twenty years of school shootings and mass gun-downs have drained my interest in dramas that thrive by putting children in jeopardy. There once was a time when the notion of a  ‘ruthless hit man’ was actually a fresh idea. This disenchantment reminds me of a quote from the German film director Wim Wenders, who said that he has a rule to pass on stories that rely on gun violence.

 

Even action films need ‘a reason to be.’
 

By 2007 director William Friedkin was no longer stunning Hollywood with movies like  The French Connection and  The Exorcist, but his reputation was still very high.  The Hunted has an excellent cast and fine production values, but died a quick death in theaters. The action direction is focused, and the main draw is a series of gritty hand-to-hand fight scenes. But the dramatic elements could have come from a comic book; nothing feels fresh or important. The core appeal is to survivalist types interested in things like dirty knife fighting. Friedkin gets excellent work from his charismatic actors … but the show feels exploitative just the same.

We couldn’t help checking out The Hunted on Kino’s new 4K Ultra HD disc, because 21 years ago I was the editor for a set of extras on the Paramount DVD release. The film never looked this good on the tiny Avid editing program. On theater screens it was a visual knockout — the cinematographer in charge was the respected Caleb Deschanel.

The story idea reads like a reject Sylvester Stallone project from the 1980s. ‘Secret Intelligence channels’ are a-buzz: ace tracker L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) is brought out of retirement to capture Aaron Hallam (Benecio Del Toro), a top-secret special forces soldier who has gone renegade. Hallam has been charged with killing hunters in the Pacific Northwest, and Bonham learns that he’s been classified as a madman on a twisted mission of revenge. But Bonham is one of the few who know Hallam’s secret: he’s a wronged man, scapegoated by the Feds.

William Friedkin used to be the number one man for serious films about crime, criminals and cops.  The French Connection opened eyes and minds to the reality of crimefighting at the police level, and  To Live and Die in L.A. had some good things to say about the crazy life of Treasury agents. The Hunted introduces a shadowy super-soldier and the equally talented super-tracker, characters that might as well be part of a fantasy.  *

The low-tech confrontations between Aaron Hallam and L.T. Bonham are jarringly realistic, but other action comes off as no more believable than super-feats in old Republic serials. Only superheroes can escape crashing trucks and churning waterfalls, or push themselves through a marathon physical ordeals after incurring serious wounds. Friedkin sees to it that it all looks realistic and dangerous, with a laudable avoidance of Olympic bullet-dodging and other Hong Kong nonsense. But The Hunted strains credibility in other ways.

Much was made during production of the authenticity of the Kosovo battle sequence, the knife fighting, and L.T. Bonham’s tracking skills. The knife warfare is certainly brutal. But the scenes where L.T. shows off his amazing tracking skills don’t work like they ought to. All we see is Tommy Lee Jones concentrating on a bit of grass, or some broken twigs, and then confidently going forward, like Natty Bumppo or an Apache warrior. Half the time, L.T.’s prey isn’t even avoiding him, so where’s the challenge?

We know that tracking skills are real, but their finer points can’t be easy to communicate in person, let alone in a briskly-paced movie. The moviemaker’s problem is a little like the ‘magic haircut’ problem addressed by writer  William Goldman.  In a short story, a really-really great haircut can be expressed with poetic language, In front of a camera, one snip of a barber’s shears looks like any other. The same goes for shots of Tommy Lee Jones squatting in a clump of ferns. Is he ‘cutting trail’ or rubbing himself with Poison Oak?

We see Hallam, in what appears to be minutes, forge a handmade steel knife with primitive tools. He also has time to whip up several more weapons, including an elaborate Rube Goldberg trap made from giant logs hung from trees. We don’t doubt that everything we see is documented somewhere, maybe written up in John Rambo’s best seller “How To Be a Mean Em Effer in The Woods.”

 

These ‘super’ characters yank the film away from the levels of reality Friedkin achieved in earlier films that detailed counterfeiting and police procedures with authority. The always-interesting Benicio Del Toro can be a sadistic maniac (the 007 film Licence to Kill), or a morally-bound policeman in an impossible job ( Traffic). He gives a wholly credible edge to Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 Sicario, as a line-straddling anti-narco operative. But Del Toro’s Hallam remains a jumble of mad killer, military rebel, religious nut, and ecological fruitcake. In one particularly pointless patch of dialogue, Hallam bemoans the deaths of some chickens.

Love or hate Friedkin’s movies, they were once original items full of surprises. The Hunted feels assembled from hand-me-down clichés familiar from TV shows. It starts with a disconnected massacre prologue in Bosnia, a failed attempt at a serious, heavy background. Hallam’s internal conflict is the subject of cheap ‘montage mansplaining.’ After he witnesses the plight of a little girl in Kosovo, Hallam experiences an  Apocalypse Now -ish montage of traumatic memories.

On the other side of the fence, Tommy Lee Jones’ quietly masculine hero L.T. Bonham also lives in a state of quiet mental anguish, mulling over his role as a trainer of secret government armies. Just like the kind of macho baloney we expect from TV’s N.C.I.S., his response to his dilemma is to retreat to the snow-covered Canadian wilderness and meditate. Like Leroy Jethro Gibbs, L.T. does trendy stuff, such as heal a wounded timber wolf. He’s healing himself, get it?

 

These character complications are straight from the comics. Despite their earnest commitment to their lives of violence, we never get enough purchase on either man, which hampers our ability to care about them. We almost wish that the film didn’t take itself so seriously.

Tommy Lee Jones escapes with his dignity, but favorite Benicio Del Toro’s voice has been re-dubbed with a non-Latino accent. It sounds odd and forced in almost every speech. The awkward lectures Hallam delivers to his girlfriend’s child are an acting low.

Because I wanted to see how the movie played in a theater, I took a chance and brought my 8 year-old-son to see the film first-run. He loved it, but the audience wasn’t all that impressed. The show couldn’t have been a positive payoff for actor Del Toro. He reportedly broke a wrist in one action scene, causing the film to be shut down for several weeks.

Other FBI heroes are barely in the picture. Connie Nielson plays F.B.I. agent Abby Durrell, a ‘standard serious woman in a tough law enforcement job,’ the kind of role that now wallpapers the weekly TV lineup. The breakneck pace results in Abby being given nothing to do but deliver exposition and incidental small talk. A fragment of a scene has Jones’ L.T. inviting Nielsen up to his cozy Canadian cabin, but it’s literally only one shot. There was once an original ending where she joins him in the snow, but it was dropped in the editing stage. At least Ms. Nielson avoids the fate handed to actress Kelly Lynch in Michael Cimino’s strained 1990 remake of  The Desperate Hours. Lynch’s character is a successful attorney, but Cimino uses her as a punching bag for Mickey Rourke, getting roughed up for extra violence and nudity.

In the final assessment, the fight scenes and chase set pieces are pretty darn good. Friedkin & Co. may have been trying to capture the thrills of Andrew Davis’s somewhat similar big hit  The Fugitive from 10 years before, with Tommy Lee Jones chasing Harrison Ford across the landscape. At 57 years of age, Jones comes off as rough-tough as ever.

 


The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Hunted 4K is a dazzler on a good home video setup, with especially rich, detailed images throughout. The so-called ‘tech specs’ are tops. Director Friedkin wanted a fine cinematographer for this aggressively outdoorsy movie, and Caleb Deschanel delivers a great look.

A big section of the story takes place in Portland Oregon, which from about 1990 on was a prime retirement destination for disgruntled Angelenos sick of the 405 freeway. In this 2003 film, Portland still looks like a green haven of sanity.

We had the opportunity to learn more about William Friedkin’s experimentation with the film’s audio. He purposely added extra low-end base to the dialog in the mix, which back on the old DVD resulted in some words being hard to understand. But the sound effects are startling, especially in the fight scenes. Brian Tyler’s music adds to the excitement as well; I remember that the studio was hoping for a hit with the inclusion of a song by Johnny Cash, “The Man Comes Around.”  Cash also provides a partial narration, partly reading some Dylan lyrics as voiceover.

 

It’s a movie for fans of big, wicked-looking knives.
 

On the Blu-ray disc only are four mini-docus produced for Paramount by Michael Arick. Interview bites with William Friedkin are intercut with those of tracking consultant John Brown, Jr., co-producer James Jacks, producer-screenwriter Art Monterastelli, and stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker, plus interview material with Tommy Lee Jones and Benecio Del Toro. The making-of pieces show a lot of background detail for the tracking and knife-fighting skills seen in the movie. The experts don’t mince words when describing how real knife fights go down — the single objective is to gut one’s opponent before he can as much as blink. We also see how the rocky ledge for the final fight was ‘rubberized’ to lessen the chance of injury when Del Toro and Jones tumble about.

Another extra gives us a selection of deleted scenes, but not the alternate ending with the romantic encounter of L.T. and Abbey. One of the deleted scenes that is included stresses Hallam’s religious background, supporting the film’s abortive ‘sacrifice of Abraham’ theme preached by Johnny Cash’s voiceover. This cryptic use of a Bible story makes us think of Samuel L. Jackson’s far more direct and totally riveting Bible lecture in  Pulp Fiction.

William Friedkin’s audio commentary is a relaxed chat that avoids production stories, when there must have been a million of them. He discusses his themes without getting too specific or offering any answers. There’s also a theatrical trailer. The good personal news is that Paramount has retained our original credits. At the time, ‘DVD extras’ were a big deal, and working on them could be well rewarded. But in disc reissues we often see our work revised with credits sequences deleted.

I remember that the advertising for The Hunted emphasized the two popular stars, attracting an audience ready for something great. The last 40 minutes of the film is a mostly dialogue-free chase that should generate some serious tension, but I don’t remember the theatrical audience getting too worked up about it. If what is wanted is crisp action direction and some exotic, credible knife fighting, The Hunted may be just the ticket.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


The Hunted 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good, maybe more like Good -minus
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements (from 2003):
Audio commentary by William Friedkin
Four making-of featurettes: Pursuing The Hunted, Filming The Hunted, Tracking The Hunted, The Cutting Edge – The Hunted.
Deleted scenes
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
December 18, 2024
(7247hunt)

*  I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but years ago, a ‘wilderness tracker’ expert made national news for a few days. A relative of Steven Spielberg had gone missing in some forest; when official searches were called off Spielberg hired the famous tracker for the job and had him flown in. Sure enough, the relative was found alive, so we’re willing to believe that such skilled experts do exist.
Did I get the story right?  I couldn’t find a reference to it online.
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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 6.51.08 PM

Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Trevor

I have the DVD & have been waiting for an upgrade forever. The regular Blu-ray from this 4K set looks excellent too. I believe all the extras are on the Blu-ray. Enjoy!

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