The Hunting Party

Director Richard Shephard (The Matador) has found a fun niche with his lampoonish, rascally take on the action-thriller. With an assured, creatively frantic style, Shepherd turns assassins and criminals of war into part of a fun world of murder, adventure, and fabulously silly intrigue. He manages to keep his films sharp enough that they still grip us with the fear of violent consequences as the best action movies do, and yet we’re also left occasionally at ease, aware that sometimes it’s all just one big cataclysmic gag. The very best moments come when the two worlds collide and we’re left stunned where we’d thought we’d be laughing and chuckling where we expected to be repulsed. It’s a great, fresh world of ingenious storytelling and The Hunting Party is yet another fun ride made in this style.

Richard Gere stars as the fearless renegade journalist Simon Hunt, known best for his courageous and sometimes outright moronic desire to get right in the middle of some of the world’s most terrible and dangerous news stories. In spite of his impressive reputation, Simon washes out following a career-killing on-air meltdown in which he berates the network news anchor and launches into a personal tirade. Years later, Simon has become something of a myth, showing up independently with personal film crews at major events, some people claiming to have seen him, others insisting he’s dead. He doesn’t turn up for sure again until 2000 when former partner Duck (Terrence Howard) runs into him unexpectedly while covering the 5th anniversary of the end of the Bosnian civil war with an inexperienced son of a network exec (Jesse Eisenberg). Hunt makes a tantalizing proposition: he knows where the infamous war criminal “The Fox” is hiding and he wants to sniff him out despite the failings of the United Nations and CIA to do the same. Soon enough the three ragtag journalists have formed their own comically under prepared search party and what they discover will shock even them.

Shephard has crafted a hilarious and engaging political satire that takes major world organizations to task and still manages to let us have a good time. As chronicled in the New York Magazine article on which the film is based, the actions of the UN, NATO, and other alliances to thoroughly pursue war criminals in Bosnia left much to be desired. Perhaps the most enjoyable flourish in the film is a coda that clarifies for us which characters and events in the film were true and which were added embellishments for the sake of the narrative. As the film confesses in its first frame, “Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true.”

Grade: B+