A Perplexingly Political Production

How bad does a film have to be for a studio to decide it's not worth releasing the movie? Sure, there are plenty of direct-to-video fare but most of those movies are made to be bad and made to be released outside the theater chains. For a film to be made, with a solid budget, with all intentions of being put out in theaters, and then for it to be pulled and shelved, it has to be a pretty awful film, right? Some tragi-comic act of hubris that everyone should have realized was going to be bad from the get-go. It has to be epic in its awfulness, right?

Well, 2020's The Hunt doesn't quite reach that lofty expectation. This isn't a "so bad it's somehow good again" film, but just one that was stupid in its design and miscalculated about how "edgy" and "subversive" it was really being. It's a bad film that, honestly, never should have gotten the green light and, yet, somehow was still made. It's not shocking or subversive, it's just a film that's trying to be smarter than it is and, still, somehow royally fails to entertain. Bad movies can still be fun, and seeing a massive act of hubris can be its own kind of enjoyment. The Hunt, though, doesn't even manage that. It's just bad.

In the film we're introduced to 12 people, plucked from their various States and dropped into a field in the middle of nowhere. As we learn, each of these people are, in some way, a massive Conservative turd, the kinds of people that subscribe to the QAnon conspiracies, think that all birds are drones, that vaccines are the government putting trackers in you, etc. They've been dropped into the middle of nowhere so they can play the role of the "hunted" in "Manorgate", a "yearly" hunt where the rich elites of liberal society can shoot and kill the assholes from the other side of the aisle that they hate.

Into this mess is dropped Crystal Creasey (Betty Gilpin), a rental car worker from Mississippi, plucked as one of the 12 for (as we learn) and Online post she made disparaging one of the elites participating in "the hunt". But, as it turns out, Crystal is a capable warrior, military trained and ready for anything. While the other eleven kidnapped victims fall, one at a time, to the traps of the elites, Crystal survives. She's the one thing the liberal elites couldn't expect: someone who actually knows what she's doing in a battle.

To say that The Hunt has fucked up politics is a massive understatement. To get all the characters into the scenario of the film it requires a ton of logic leaps that the story can't quite get over. You have to have a group of people that are willing to hunt other people, you have to have a country (Croatia, in this film) willing to let people hunt people, and you have to have all these people be smart enough to do the necessary research on their victims to find the ones they want (with a twist that makes this even more unlikely, as we learn) while also training to be the kinds of people that can handle hunting other people. That's a lot to assume.

In practice, instead, it plays more like wish fulfillment without any brains behind it. "Oh, those Conservatives! The talk about their 2nd Amendment rights and how they're survivalists, but the second we put them in the shit they go to pieces and die. They're all just dumb hicks, so let's kill them." I'm not a Conservative, not in the least, and I found this setup to be both stupid and reprehensible. It's not a setup for a story that gets you invested, at all, and so you're left trying to decide who to root for.

Part of the issue is that the eleven random "deplorables" in the film never get any fleshing out. They're all simple stereotypes dropped into the script to spout some racists barb or conspiracy theory comment. None of them ever emerge as real people so you don't care if they live or die. Hell, because they're so awful you active want them to die as soon as possible and get disappointed when they linger for any length of time. The film needed victims with more nuance, more shading, but this isn't that kind of film.

Same goes for the villains of the piece, of course: the Liberal Elite. This group are just as shallow and basic as the people they're hunting. The joke for them is they "try" to be "good", making sure they correct themselves if they say something that isn't P.C. Fact is that (most) liberals don't talk like this any more than (most) aren't idiots frothing at the mouth as they talk about one conspiracy theory or another. Neither group is represented properly and they're all just empty suits sitting there so the writers can have them spout of idiotic politics.

The only character worth a damn is Crystal, but for whatever reason the film doesn't even handle her like a real character. We spend most of the movie following her around but we never learn anything about her, not really. There's a long sequence where her back-story is filled in, only for Crystal to note, "oh, that's not me, that's a different Crystal," and her one moment of real shading is ruined. Crystal here is a cypher, a Mary Sue setup so the writers can kill everyone they hate (which seems to be everyone) with impunity.

Thing is, there's a version of the film that I think could work. In movies where one group of people is stalked and killed by another it's usually people in a remote cabin hunted by backwood hicks. TO have the hicks be the ones hunted by the other side is an interesting idea, and if the film could have provided proper shading to our "hicks" and made the "villains" into a group they'd been terrorizing that then turned the tables, that's something. It's certainly a more interesting idea than the way this film constructs its "hicks get what they deserve" wish fulfillment.

The fact is that this is a stupid, poorly-written film that really doesn't have any clue what it's doing. It's an immature flick made by regressed idiots, a movie that tries to dress itself as up as smart political commentary but all it manages is brainless mockery. This film wouldn't have been a success even if it hadn't been pulled, shelved, and put out when no one cared about it any longer. This is just a bad movie and the studio suits should have realized that before it ever got out of the scripting stage. I just feel bad for all the actors involved in this clusterfuck.

There's a certain, sad irony in the fact that the film was pulled because of a mass shooting and that we've had so many mass shootings since then that we can't even remember which shooting stopped the release of this film originally. That irony is a larger comment about society that anything this worthless film has to say. Avoid The Hunt and it's brainless "commentary"; this film has nothing to say that's worth listening to.