Sunday afternoon I saw the Hunted. Benicio del Toro plays a trained black ops type assassin who, ya know, 'crosses the line' and starts killing the black ops type assassins who come after him when he messes up an operation. He can disappear when he wants to, live in a hole in a tree for extended periods of time, kill expertly and without remorse, and basically behave like a serial killer in the employ of the U.S. military. His character is a cross between Hannibal Lecter and The Fugitive, a mix calculated to elicit our voyeuristic envy and sympathy even as he butchers FBI agents and other people less attractive than del Toro.
Yet no moment in this film is creepier than a scene in which del Toro is shown bonding with a little girl. We're supposed to see that Aaron Hallam (B. del T.) is a loving human being and potential dad material beneath his gruff gut-a-hunter-like-an-armed-pig exterior, but he is clearly so uncomfortable talking to a child that the whole scene plays like Liam Neeson trying to interact with Jar Jar Binks. The little girl is supposed to adore him, but I don't think that he actually looks at the child or even faces her in the few scenes that they share together. He's more like the original absent dad than the replacement father he's being presented as. And how do you explain the following dialogue:
GIRL: (swivels her head at noise in the underbrush) What was that?
B del T: Don'worry, thas'jus'akitty. Buhwedon'wan'tobother it. It'shunting.
GIRL: Does it know we're here?
B del T: Ohyes.
GIRL: How does it know?
B del T: (thinks, looks pensive) Itsensesit. (nods to self)
Senses it? How about: We're talking pretty loudly and it can hear us. How about: the kitty's ten feet away from us and we're sitting out in plain sight on the front yard. Or how about the following scenario:
GIRL: (swivels her head at noise in the underbrush) What was that?
B del T: (pulls knife out, throws it unerringly, pins cat to tree) Tha'wasakitty. Itwon'botherusanymorelittlegirl.
GIRL: Mommmiieee!
B del T: (grabs girl by the neck) Youbequietnowlittlegirl. I'llgutya.
Creepiness aside, I can't figure out why the casting director pulled a reverse Heston and a half Connery, casting del Toro as a young Anglo (Aaron Hallam?) soldier. There are scenes in training camp in which del Toro clearly has a decade on the other recruits. It seems to be a matter of pure laziness that the script was not changed even minimally to reflect del Toro's Latino background. Not that it matters; B. del T. is, to my way of thinking, best when he's slightly detached and quietly chuckling at the action around him. In The Hunted he has to turn up the intensity so high that all irony is whited out, the result being that he spends most of time looking kind of constipated. Maybe that's why he spends most of the movie running full tilt. Got. To get. Immodium.
As for Tommy Lee Jones, his understated acting and air of humility go a long way towards saving this movie. Early in the film he follows a white wolf and rescues it from a snare, then delivers a quick beating on the guy who set the trap. From another actor it would come off as appallingly self-aggrandizing, the sort of scene we can expect to see from Brad Pitt in ten years or so. But Jones manages to make us believe that such gentle heroics may actually exist in this world. And when, at the movie's close, he stands outside his cabin in British Columbia and watches that same wolf loping through the forest, we sense his deep pleasure at seeing that creature once more, even with his back is to the camera.
I think The Hunted breaks new generic ground. This an excellent panting, slapping, punching, falling over and jumping up again movie. It's also a great slashing and cutting movie. And in fact, I'd say that in the genre of quick-flashes-of-skulls-with-sounds-of-crying-children films, The Hunted is definitely in the top ten. Top fifteen. Okay, sick of thinking about this film.
Retracted on 2003-03-17::2:49 p.m.
parode - exode