“Depends on whether they’re smart pretending to be idiots or idiots pretending to be smart.”

Kyle’s rating: The hunt for entertaining relevance continues . . .

Kyle’s review: There are occurrences in the colorful and messy world of pop culture that seem destined to become nothing more than the answer to a trivia question in the game/app of your preference. That doesn’t speak necessarily to the quality of the ‘thing’ in question. Only that its legacy will be dominated largely by the contextual facts surrounding it. For example: maybe you love Popeye’s new-as-of-2019 chicken sandwich, or maybe you hate it, or maybe you’ve never tried it. But the majority of the world will always think of it as the lit match that sparked an American food fight where some locations sold out of it completely and didn’t have it again for months, while social media lit up with Chick-fil-A superfans screaming about their dominance in the fried chicken sandwich market. It was all kind of a big deal that simultaneously wasn’t at all.

Such is The Hunt. Due to its subject matter (both real and imagined) and as a reaction to real-life tragedy, the movie became a political hot potato and was pulled from its original 2019 theatrical release date for a nebulous ‘whenever’ future date. It was later targeted for a March 2020 release, with a revamped advertising campaign that mocked the fact that the film itself was weighed down with a wide variety of labels and preconceptions despite the fact that ‘no one’ had actually seen it yet. It could be mind-meltingly outrageous ‘red state versus blue state’ violent satire or it could be some kind of political firebomb designed to blow up all kinds of societal fault lines and reap the box office benefits. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed down theaters and The Hunt was suddenly one of the ‘lucky’ films sent to video-on-demand in the early weeks of stay-at-home orders, it was finally time to find out exactly what The Hunt was made of, and whom exactly it targeted.

Unfortunately, The Hunt is a largely toothless film that barely manifests any real satire, meaningful action, or rebellious spark. It wastes an excellent performance by Betty Gilpin and honestly doesn’t do much of anything. If they set out to shock and offend, they sadly managed only to kill two hours of viewers’ time in the most unmemorable way they could.

Perhaps the only thrills of this Hunt are in the early revelations about the nature of the dangerous situation a group of characters find themselves in, so I will be somewhat coy about both the characters’ theories and the eventual truth that is muddily revealed via a ‘villain’s monologue’ method that isn’t nearly as trope-busting as the film seems to think it is. There is absolutely a political element to the plot that helps it rise above the standard Most Dangerous Game narrative, but in the absence of ironic wit The Hunt is more an elbow to the ribs than a bullet to the bone.

I’ll admit I had some high hopes for The Hunt that in being dashed left me more annoyed that I should be. I was anticipating something close to Tucker and Dale Versus Evil, where the frenetic misjudgments that drive the plot underline the naive assumptions both the characters and we the viewers can be endlessly guilty of. That lone bright spot of Betty Gilpin shines a particular light on this disconnect: Gilpin convincingly rolls her eyes at every aspect of her predicament even as she proves resilient and more dangerous than expected. But nothing and no one in the film, not even the surprise guest star(s), can counter Gilpin’s exasperated violence with charming righteousness or even malicious enjoyment, and so The Hunt ultimately greets months of anxious chatter and expectation with little more than a tired shrug.

Trivia

• The movie was yanked from its original release date due to mass shootings, then rescheduled for March 13th, 2020, to then be affected drastically at the box office by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
• It was believed the film was originally going to be called “Red State vs Blue State,” but this was later denied by Universal, who stated it was never a working title anytime during production.

Quotes

Don: How’d you know he was lying?
Crystal: Because everyone is lying.