![]() Let’s assume we can all agree that there’s too much violence in American movies today. The words “trigger warning” may not have been invented with “The Hunt” in mind, but they’ve seldom seemed more apt in describing a film that stops just shy of fomenting civil war as it pits Left against Right, Blue (bloods) against Red (necks), in a bloody battle royale that reduces both sides to ridiculous caricatures.Īnd yet, “The Hunt” is a good deal smarter - and no more outrageous - than most studio horror films, while its political angle at least encourages debate, suggesting that there’s more to this hot potato than mere provocation. ![]() Sure enough, Zobel, Lindelof and producer Jason Blum (riding high on last month’s “The Invisible Man”) have wrought a gory, hard-R exploitation movie masquerading as political satire, one that takes unseemly delight in dispatching yahoos on either end of the spectrum via shotgun, crossbow, hand grenade and all manner of hastily improvised weapons. No matter who you ask, the “right to bear arms” was never intended as justification for Americans to turn their guns against those they disagree with, whereas that’s the premise from which “Lost” creator Damon Lindelof and co-writer Nick Cuse depart here - partisan politics taken to their most irreconcilable extremes - as Zobel proves just the director to execute such a tight, well-oiled shock-a-thon. While not nearly as incendiary as the early coverage made it out to be, “The Hunt” gives skeptics ample ammunition to condemn this twisted riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a posse of heavily armed liberal elites get carried away exercising their Second Amendment rights against a dozen “deplorables” - as the hunters label their prey, adopting Hillary Clinton’s dismissive, dehumanizing term for the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” contingent whose fringe beliefs have found purchase with President Trump. 27 release date and rescheduled the thriller for spring 2020, making room for national mourning in the wake of the horrific events, only to turn around and use the controversy as an unconventional marketing hook. In response, Universal ripped director Craig Zobel’s movie from its Sept. Last summer, even before the public had gotten a chance to see it, humans-hunting-humans thriller “ The Hunt” became a target for pundits on both sides of the gun control debate, when mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, prompted critics to consider the media’s role in glorifying violence.
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