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88Walking in, I thought I knew what to expect, but i didn't anticipate how William Friedkin would jolt me with the immediate urgency of the action. This is not an arm's-length chase picture, but a close physical duel between its two main characters.
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80It's a good ride, briskly paced, well played and vividly photographed by Caleb Deschanel.
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75Engrossing as it is, The Hunted is more a showcase for formidable talent than anything else. It's a brainy, exciting but shallow show -- an expert's action movie that almost runs out of breath.
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75Isn't exactly fraught with psychological depth and nuance, but as a stalker-stalkee suspenser, the pic has some nice things going for it.
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67While the plot of The Hunted is tiresome and the character development is phlegmatic, the picture holds fascination in its determination to trim away chat and guff and focus on tempo and filmic textures.
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67All about the thrill of the chase, and Friedkin challenges the antiseptic spectacle and fantasy flamboyance of computer-enhanced blockbusters with a lean, mean manhunt thriller and gritty, hard-edged style.
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63Few modern thrillers aspire to look this striking.
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60Aided by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Friedkin works economically, lending the film the mark of a master craftsman, albeit of the coldly efficient variety. The terseness and surplus of technical skill make The Hunted surprisingly engaging.
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60What keeps you watching isn't the story or the actors, none of whom are at the top of their form, but the relentlessness of Friedkin's vision. The film has great forward thrust -- Friedkin's a full-throttle guy -- and the director knows where to put the camera.
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50Just a "Rambo" rehash.
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50The Hunted is so openly, defiantly derivative of 1982's "First Blood," you figure there has to be a copyright lawsuit brewing right this very minute.
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50This is schlock -– by-the-numbers action that ignores character development to the point where we find it hard to care whether L.T. catches Hallam.
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50Friedkin has huffed and puffed and blown up a single chase sequence into the whole damn movie. You got your hunted, you got your hunter, and away they go. And go and go.
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50The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.
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50Jones seems to have trouble keeping up with the large amount of action he's required to participate in. And Del Toro seems ill-cast and ill-used.
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50Brutally exciting and sometimes brutally inept.
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50Routine, superficial manhunt stuff.
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50In one slack exchange, Del Toro intimates that the government wants to shut him up because he knows too much, but apparently someone decided that this thing was silly enough already and the matter was dropped.
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40If your idea of a good time at the movies is watching two grown men go at it with fists and shivs and nasty wilderness booby-traps, then you're in luck.
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40The bottom line is the movie's a mess. Friedkin would like one to believe there's more than meets the eye to his tale of two trackers.
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40Aspiring to pure action -- several very long passages are wordless -- the movie ends up teetering on the brink of self-parody.
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38As in "The Edge," in which Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins were stranded in the wilds, you can earn a wildernesssurvival merit badge just from watching.
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38Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.
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38To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.
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30The movie appears brutally cut which might explain its inability to develop a thought, much less any narrative momentum.
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30This superficial nonsense is easily ignored; that the movie runs out of gas at the midpoint isn't.
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30Essentially a reheating of 1982's "First Blood" -- a psychologically wounded warrior-vet pits himself against civilized America -- but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller.
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30Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.
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25It soon gets down to its real business: fights, face-offs, and showdowns mired in the shallowest sort of Hollywood machismo.
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25The only prize this shamelessly derivative schlock is likely to be in the running for is the year's dullest thriller.
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25Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.
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25You keep waiting for there to be more, but there never is -- other than the fact that it all gets gorier and uglier as the dyspeptic look on Jones' face progresses from a four- to a six-a-day scotch-and-peppermint schnapps hangover.
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20The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.
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10It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 16
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Mixed: 0 out of 16
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Negative: 10 out of 16
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