Classic Movie Review: 'The Hunted'

The Hunted (2003)

Directed by William Friedkin

Written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, Art Monterastelli

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Tommy Lee Jones, Connie Nielsen

Release Date March 14th, 2003

Published August 8th, 2023

Director William Friedkin, the action director best known for the Oscar winner The French Connection returned after a lengthy layoff from movies in 2003 with yet another great chase movie. In The Hunted, Friedkin teamed with fellow Oscar winners Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones in a one on one, man versus man, chase movie that is remarkable for its economy of characters and lack of special effects. Hand to hand combat in movies usually involves some form of martial arts. In The Hunted, a hand to hand knife fight is the central scene of the entire film and the combat feels raw and exciting.

In The Hunted Benicio Del Toro plays Aron Hallem, a Special Forces soldier whom we are introduced to as he and his unit infiltrate a Serbian incursion in Albania. Incursion is merely a kinder term for genocidal slaughtering as Aron is witness to horrible atrocities including children being forced to watch their parents killed before they are then be killed. Despite the horrific atrocities, Aron sticks to his mission, which is to kill the commander of the Serbian forces, which he does as coldly and efficiently as one might gut a fish. Back in the States, Aron is awarded the Medal of Honor for combat bravery. However, in his quiet moments, Aron is tormented by the atrocities that he could not prevent.

Parallel to Aron's story is that of his mentor, a survivalist named L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones). Though Bonham is not a military man, he was contracted years ago to teach special forces officers how to kill in cold blood. Working off his debt of conscience in British Columbia, Bonham rebuilds his karma protecting wildlife from trappers. Meanwhile Aron, back in the States, is also into wildlife but to more of an extreme. A frightening and exhilarating scene has Aron slice up a pair of goofy looking, orange vest and camouflage wearing hunters.

Aron thinks these men deserved to die because they kill without respect, using their high tech equipment instead of their bare hands. Aron uses the lack of honor as an excuse to hunt and kill the hunters and to begin targeting others who might try the same tactics. Because the murders happened in a federally protected forest, the FBI, lead by field agent Abbie Durrell (Connie Nielsen), has jurisdiction over the case. Abbie and her team proceed as if a group of people committed these murders. It's not until an old FBI buddy recognizes the style of the severity of the crime and calls in L.T. who quickly narrows the search to one man.

From there The Hunted boils down to a series of well staged action scenes involving trains, cars, bridges, the woods, the water, etc. Any and everything one could find in the film’s home city of Portland, Oregon provides a gorgeous background for The Hunted. With all this chasing going on, one can only imagine audience fatigue would set in quickly. However, director William Friedkin is so precise in his pacing of The Hunted that, even with all of the running, jumping and climbing that our protagonists do, we never tire and we never leave the edge of our seats either.

Friedkin and screenwriters David and Peter Griffiths can't resist teasing the audience with the classic antihero backstory. Entire characters and subplots are tossed in to tease the audience that maybe Hallem isn't all that bad. He has a girlfriend with a young daughter who both cares about him and who he fiercely protects. Also, there are other fellow special forces guys who enter the picture and tease that Hallem may not be paranoid about people coming to get him, which allows the audience a moment of conspiracy theory about the hunters Aron killed. Maybe they weren't really hunters, hmmm.

Benicio Del Toro is exceptional in The Hunted playing a deeply haunted man with dimensions, contradictions and a sense of menace that makes him an exciting anti-hero. The script tends to try and underline why the character of Aron Hallam may be justified in his violence but Del Toro never falls into the trap of trying to make Hallam a sympathetic protagonist. Del Toro's performance is constantly in the moment, he lets the rest of the movie do the explaining while he remains a coiled snake ready to strike against anyone who threatens what little peace he can find.

The Hunted culminates with an exceptionally well choreographed knife fight scene that, despite what many others critics said at the time in 2003 saud, felt to this critic to authentic and realistic. There are no matrix style histrionics, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would be out of place here. This is just straight-edge blade, man to man combat between two men whose skill in killing comes not from their physical attributes but from their wit and their willingness to take a blow to land a blow. It's an awesome scene and in the hands of incredibly skilled actors, it feels dangerous.

When it was announced on Monday, August 7th, 2023, that William Friedkin had passed away, I did what many film fans did and turned to my film collection. The first movie I reached for was The Hunted. Having seen it and written about it in 2003, it occurred to me that I hadn't watched it since that movie theater experience. Watching it again, all of the same excitement and suspense came washing over me. I get what people see in The Exorcist or The French Connection, or Crusing, but, for my money, Friedkin's best piece of work is The Hunted and that incredibly intense knife fight sequence at the end of the film is my thesis statement on Friedkin's talent.

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