The Hunted

by J.E. Sawyer

Holy shit! Do you like knife fights and tracking? If so, I bet The Hunted, starring Academy Award winnner Tommy Lee Jones, Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro and Hot Danish Chick Connie Nielsen will be right up your alley! But boy, if you don't get off on a solid 94 minutes of tracking and knife fighting, you may be a little disappointed.

This is not The Fugitive. Hell, it's not even U.S. Marshals. It's just William Friedkin throwing bearded Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones at another dumb chase movie. In this dumb chase movie, Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro plays a renegade Special Forces assassin who's gone nuttier than a squirrel in September. He's running around in the woods of Oregon knifing up other Special Forces guys who have been sent to take him out. He says a few things throughout the course of the film about how people don't respect nature and animals and shit, but I was about to snap the neck of a spotted owl if TLJ didn't track BDT down fast enough to have another knife fight.

Please note the presence of the knife in the previous passage. Now, let's move on.
Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones is the man who trained him and, ergo, must hunt him down. In several flashback scenes, we learn that the vast majority of his Special Forces training consisted of tracking, knife fighting, and making knives out of the raw elements of the Earth -- like busted up cars, rocks, and chifforobes. This last part becomes important later, when both men lose their knives.

Connie Nielsen is the token pseudo-romantic interest (and there's about as much chemistry between her and TLJ as a 6th grader's vinegar and baking soda volcano). She is the FBI Special Agent sent to bring BDT in for his grisly murders. However, her character is irrelevant to the plot because she's completely ineffectual at finding Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro without the mad tracking skillz of Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones. She doesn't even use a knife once in the whole damned movie. Clearly, William Friedkin is trying to tell us something: dumb broads bring guns to knife fights.

I think I've pretty much summarized the movie for you, so I'll move on to the quick recap. There's tracking in the forest, tracking in Portland (above and below ground), tracking in houses, tracking in Canada, and knife fights in the forest, Portland, and by some rapids. The knife fight by the rapids is preceded by, I shit you negative, Tommy Lee Jones crafting a knife from rocks and Benicio Del Toro forging a knife from the top of a car windshield in a small campfire. At this point, I was beginning to expect that the final duel between the men would be a Raingutter Regatta or Pinewood Derby held at the Boy Scout Troop 137 pot luck.

If I had to pick a literary equivalent to The Hunted, it would probably be The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss. Basically, Benicio Del Toro is like the Lorax but, you know, with a knife. Society is, of course, the Onceler. I think that leaves Tommy Lee Jones as a Brown Bar-ba-loot and Connie Nielsen as a Swomee-Swan. However, I think I'd rather read The Lorax fifteen times in Polish than watch The Hunted again. Because it sucks ass.

P.S.: I wrote this review because I know Anna wants to make out with Benicio Del Toro and I live to break Anna's heart.