The Hunting Party
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Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 22 Critics What's this?

User Score
6.5 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 10 Ratings

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  • Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard
  • Summary: TV News reporter Simon Hunt and cameraman Duck have worked in the world's hottest war zones: from Bosnia to Iraq, from Somalia to El Salvador. Together they have dodged bullets, filed incisive reports and collected Emmy awards. Then one terrible day in a Bosnian village everything changes. During a live broadcast on national television, Simon has a meltdown. After that, Duck is promoted and Simon just disappears. Five years later Duck returns to Sarajevo with rookie reporter Benjamin to cover the fifth anniversary of the end of the war. Simon shows up, a ghost from the past, with the promise of a world exclusive. He convinces Duck that he knows the whereabouts of Bosnia’s most wanted war criminal “The Fox.” Armed with only spurious information Simon, Duck and Benjamin embark on a dark and dangerous mission that takes them deep into hostile territory. (The Weinstein Company)
    … Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 22
  2. Mixed: 7 out of 22
  3. Negative: 3 out of 22
  1. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Robert Wilonsky
    90
    Like many of the best movies about war and its lingering echo, The Hunting Party is full of dark humor. Writer-director Richard Shepard, maker of 2005's "The Matador," is becoming a master at finding the right tone, balancing the seriousness of his characters' purpose with the madness of their intentions.
  2. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    75
    Throw in some business with the CIA, add a small army of Serbian thugs and a mysterious Croatian beauty, and The Hunting Party picks up speed, careening through the forests where the Fox may or may not be hiding out. Whatever fate awaits, it can't be good. But it can be fun.
  3. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    50
    By the time the end credits roll, you're still not sure what kind of movie The Hunting Party is supposed to be, other than just queasy.
  4. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    33
    The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

See all 22 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 4
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 4
  3. Negative: 0 out of 4
  1. AlenO.
    10
    Great movie. People should go and see it. It is worth the money.
  2. FoasjianoS.
    9
    Excellent, good story, good cast, none of this randomness and subplot metaphoric bull, that ncfom, and twbb had. Go and see it.
  3. mikeg
    9
    very well done movie. suspenseful from beginning to end. it's a much better movie than most of the crap Hollywood's turning out.If you want to watch a few dvd rentals this year, this movie has to be one of them. Only criticism is that the story isn't that accurate and they cast the cia in a bad light for having the fox step down form power instead of killing him. How many times has the CIA tried to kill Castro? over 100.… Expand
  4. ChadS.
    7
    Once you go black, you can never go back; black, as in comedy, not...never mind. At the outset, "The Hunting Party" establishes Simon(Richard Gere) as the sort of narcissistic television journalist who covers wars for his own glory, rather than preserve the journalistic notion that the public has a right to know. Simon is an adrenaline junkie; the near-death experience is his fix. He loves the spotlight; Duck(Terrence Howard), his cameraman, is a junkie, too, who gets high on whizzing bullets and the afterglow of Simon's fame. The less we know about these men's personal lives, the better. "The Hunting Party" is a rollicking good time when the three C.I.A. poseurs(Benjamin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is like the virgin you see in teen sex-comedies who pops his cherry by the third reel) keep an emotional distance from the mayhem and heartbreak that ethnic cleansing creates, by cracking wise in a protective bubble of fearless obliviousness. Clearly, this filmmaker wants to be a maverick like the late-Robert Altman, but "The Hunting Party" loses some of its verve and "M*A*S*H"-like spirit, in a scene that explains why Simon committed career suicide during a live feed from Bosnia. This display of Simon's humanity doesn't derail "The Hunting Party"; the film quickly finds its footing with its precarious balancing act of absurdism and reflexiveness(pertaining to the action-movie genre), but it hurts the film's agenda, I think, to portray contemporary television journalists as being transparent and insincere fame-mongerers, who get into the reporting racket, solely, for the self-promotion and accolades it affords them.… Expand

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