Thursday 30 April 2020

Movie Review: THE HUNT (2020)

The Hunt


I saw a trailer for The Hunt a while back, so I thought I'd check it out. After all, it's a Blumhouse production, and that normally means it's going to be good (OK, aside from the new Black Christmas and a handful of other turkeys).


SPOILERS AHEAD

I loved it! The film starts with a short scene of text messages going back and forth, then it moves onto what appears to be unconscious hostages on a plane being taken somewhere to be hunted. The victims all wake up in a field and there's a huge box full of weapons for them to defend themselves with. Sound familiar? At this point I wondered how much more shamefully they're going to rip off The Hunger Games? Perhaps as much as The Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale? Would they be that brazen? 

Then I see Emma Roberts! I fucking love Emma Roberts! I'm a huge fan of Scream Queens, Scream IV, American Horror Story etc. I didn't realise she was in this, so I'm now totally psyched. However, most of the characters we are introduced to get slaughtered in the first few minutes including Emma Roberts' character.

Some survivors get to a gas station where they get murdered by the staff. I had my suspicions that I was getting trolled by this movie and now it was confirmed. Every character I had been introduced to who was trying to survive this had now been killed off.

It's at this point that we get introduced to the hero of the story who is played by Betty Gilpin from GLOW. She's a badass, military trained warrior who is taking on the bad guys like a kind of hot Rambo. She has loads of action scenes throughout the film, and an amazing one-on-one fight with the main villain in the finale. It's literally amazing and puts her up there with any 80's action hero you'd care to mention. If anything, her role in this movie is the perfect audition for a Marvel superhero role or something else huge. Seriously, she kicks fucking ass and her performance truly make The Hunt worth watching for her performance alone.

Tone-wise The Hunt is more of a Black Comedy than a Horror, and has way more in common with the original Cabin Fever than it does with The Purge, Hostel, or Battle Royale.

The whole thing is soaked in satire and social commentary. Early in the movie, one of the victims tells the others that they're being hunted by super rich liberal elites for sport, and they do this every year. That is what 'The Hunt' is.

It transpires that this is a ridiculous conspiracy theory that has been doing the rounds and has caused some genuine damage in the real world. Some of the 'liberal elites' had texted each other some inappropriate things, which we later find out are the messages we saw at the very start of the movie, and they lose their jobs because of it.

Blaming the conspiracy theorists who are making these accusations online, the now ex-director of the company they worked for decides to make this fantasy a reality and teach them a lesson. That's who the victims are. Redneck conspiracy theory idiots who have been typing shit on the internet, and now they're going to get what's coming to them! It reminds me of the Jay and Silent Bob film where they blow all their money flying around America to beat up everyone who wrote shit about them on the internet. The Hunt is basically that, but with more violence.

It's certainly a refreshing film, and although it's far from the one I thought I was about to watch, I loved every minute of it. It's witty, makes fun of various extreme characters from the ultra-politically correct to climate change deniers. If anything, it reminds us that we should watch more movies and spend less of our time and attention on idiots on the internet.

The Hunt is over-the-top, hilarious, and a modern-day Black Comedy classic. Part of me wishes that this was based on a true story.

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