'Hunted' is a waste of your time

By Marshall Fine
Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro star in a lame and lackluster action film that's way too predictable and drags on way too long. Gannett News Service 'The Hunted' Stars: R, for profanity, violence 90 minutes

You know the type: He's at one with nature, stealthy as a ghost, resourceful as an Eagle Scout, able to kill swiftly and quietly with his bare hands — and troubled by both his deadly skills and society's willingness to exploit them.

It's a long, overgrown path that stretches from James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye to John Rambo in David Morrell's book, "First Blood" (not to be confused with Sylvester Stallone's overblown movie version). In "The Hunted," we get not one, but two of these sensitive outdoor types, willing to commit mayhem to protect their personal boundaries.

One of them is Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), first glimpsed as a Special Forces assassin in Bosnia, taking out a vicious warlord after watching his troops commit acts of genocide. He gets the Silver Star for his humanitarian act of evisceration. But he can't shut down the horrifying images of war that haunt his sleepless nights.

In the simplistic script by a trio of writers, Aaron disappears from the military and sets up shop in the woods outside Portland, Ore., casually gutting deer hunters whose high-powered rifles and scopes don't sufficiently respect their prey, in his mind. Words to live by: Don't dis the deer.

To catch him, the FBI calls in L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), who taught Aaron everything he knows. The son of a tracker, L.T. now lives in the woods outside Vancouver, British Columbia, where he dances with wolves and beats up the lazy hunters who set snares for them.

Director William Friedkin ("The French Connection") is a past master at action, but he can't make sense of a predictable script. It turns these two natural men loose in downtown Portland. As the action escalates to its inevitable showdown, so does the level of preposterousness . By the end, it's off the charts.

The script makes a couple of feints at being about something. At one point, it seems to be leading us toward the conclusion that the seemingly mad Aaron may actually hold the key to some massive covert operation the government is trying to cover up. It wouldn't have made much more sense (though it worked in "Conspiracy Theory"); still, it would have been more interesting than what's there: a single-track story that seems to shed IQ points by the page.

Del Toro tries to make his sleepy-eyed affability into a whole character and almost succeeds. Certainly, he's got more of an edge than Jones, who phones in a variation on his disdainfully competent tough-guy persona.

Some connect-the-dots action films are entertaining, just for the unexpected shape they can take. But "The Hunted" isn't one of them, perhaps because the shape these dots describe is a straight line. Here's a 90-minute film that feels 20 minutes too long.

Marshall Fine is national movie correspondent for Gannett News Service.