NOTE: The video in this post spoils a portion of the ending of The Hunted.
We finally get to see Bencio Del Toro go primal in The Wolfman this weekend. Which is really all the excuse I need to throw some attention on William Friedkin’s woefully underrated The Hunted, another film in which Del Toro lost his shit and eviscerated people in the woods. Essentially, Del Toro plays a special-forces soldier who goes on a killing rampage in the Oregon forests while his former mentor (Tommy Lee Jones in muted Sam Gerard mode) hunts him down.
It’s in no way a perfect movie (it mocks plausibility during the final act). Yet, it has some fierce knife fights. And let’s face it, we all love a good, old-fashioned dagger duel (don’t we? maybe not…). Something about a knife fight grabs me by my primeval caveman nature, and I’m going to say it: The Hunted‘s two blade battles are among the most gritty, raw fight scenes committed to film in the last several years. Roger Ebert summed it up best in his positive review:
We’ve seen so many fancy high-tech computer-assisted fight scenes in recent movies that we assume the fighters can fly. They live in a world of gravity-free speed-up. Not so Friedkin’s characters. Their fight is gravity-based. Their arms and legs are heavy. Their blows land solidly, with pain on both sides. They gasp and grunt with effort. They can be awkward and desperate. They both know the techniques of hand-to-hand combat, but in real life, it isn’t scripted, and you know what? It isn’t so easy. We are involved in the immediate, exhausting, draining physical work of fighting.
These are the type of fight scenes I wish more movies would aim for. I like my fights messy. Sure, choreographed martial arts are pretty, but the combatants might as well be doing the tango. It’s dancing. Thanks to the movies we have a romanticized vision of fighting. When in reality hand-to-hand combat between two apt ass-kickers tends to end like most UFC fights, with two guys on the ground humping one another into submission. The Hunted understands this truth. I wish more movies would.
The rest of the film could have sucked and I’d still recommend it for those scenes. Yet, if you take a few leaps of logic, The Hunted is a solid chase film in which Friedkin (who hadn’t made a good movie in nearly 20 years) flexes some real filmmaking muscle. Nothing fancy. Just a deft display of good film suspense mechanics. And then there’s the brilliant execution of the film’s eerie, apocalyptic tone set perfectly by Johnny Cash’s opening narration, a reading of lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” and finishing out with Cash’s masterful “The Man Comes Around” playing over the end credits (all of which gives The Hunted more weight than it probably deserves).
So if you don’t feel like sitting in a theater this Valentine’s Day weekend while teenage kids text and giggle as Del Toro gets his inner-savage on, but you need some beastly Del Toro, take a look at The Hunted… or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but that’s another column for another time.
NOTE: “The Goods” is a regular mini-column focusing on, well, good stuff, whether it be nifty news, finding the sunshine in otherwise bad things, or just pointing out something really cool like an interesting movie poster, little seen film (seriously, give The Hunted a try), or viral video. This is a column attempting to add a slight bit of counter-balance to the boring sourness the Internet radiates. That’s not saying this column discourages robust debate on its topics. In fact, just the opposite. If you disagree with anything, say so. We just hope you do it in a civil, thoughtful manner.
