The Hunt (2020)
REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER
The Blumhouse / Damon Lindelof movie, THE HUNT, is a much better film than it appears to be, or rather, than what I expected.
Not another riff on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, you might say. Yes, but this is fun and spicy. And writers Lindelof and Nick Cuse flip the expectations so the hunters are privileged liberals, while the hunted are "deplorables", "rednecks", on-line SJWs.
The team (Lindelof, Cuse and director Craig Zobel) also flip things around with the casting... no spoilers, but the survival expectations of the characters are not what they might promise to be. The film keeps itself on its toes.
And then there is its secret weapon.
Betty Gilpin.
She is why you should watch the film.
She is all herself (watch her in GLOW) but if I had to describe her performance in THE HUNT, I'd say she channels the idiosyncracies of Jodie Comer's Villanelle with the unexpected heroism of Darwin Joston's Napoleon Wilson in Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT THIRTEEN.
Hilary Swank is on fine form; as is Emma Roberts. And how good was it to see Amy Madigan again! I love Amy Madigan. Married to Ed Harris since the early eighties.
And there's a reasonably good kitchen fight (I know people who collect kitchen fight scenes in movies).
I say reasonably good because the film would have benefitted from a bigger budget and having more time. It is over too swiftly (running time of 90 minutes). I wanted more and longer from each of its sections. It would have made a very tasty 100 minutes.
It feels like it would sit nicely in a new genre of incredibly self-aware exploitation films that still deliver on the genre expectation. Like THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, or READY OR NOT.
Trump denounced THE HUNT before he saw it; and its release was harmed by the covid closure of the cinemas.
I'm saying her name again. Betty Gilpin.