Cynical Cinema

I hate to call something a must-watch, because people send me emails, angry that I said Hot Fuzz is a must-watch, and they hate British people. Or that A History of Violence is a must-watch, but they hate violence! (I really did get both of these emails. I liked the violence one best.) But this is one. The Hunting Party is a movie that asks the question - how hard are the agencies of the world really looking for the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? Specifically, this movie deals with the CIA and their “efforts” to track down the war criminals of the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. As it stands right now, most of the war criminals - murderers, genocidaires, rapists and worse - from the former Yugoslavia are still on the loose, (many believe some are sheltered in Russia) despite agencies like the CIA having vowed to track them down and find them half a decade ago.

The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a reporter and a cameraman who have been through many wars together. The film is inspired by the true story of a disgraced reporter, played by Gere, and his cameraman (Howard) and a wet-behind-the-ears young journalist who has to prove his merit because he is the big boss’s son. The three of them take off into the former Yugoslavia, searching for the region’s most notorious and dangerous war criminal, the butcher known as “The Fox”. How much of what transpires after that is true and how much is fiction, I don’t know. But I do know that the movie is enthralling. Three things make The Hunting Party tremendous. First, the social conscience and the real-world political questions raised by the film. Secondly, it’s pacing. The first time you see Richard Gere’s live, on-air meltdown on national TV, it’s almost comical, in a way. Later, you learn the circumstances behind that meltdown, and when you look back on it, you can no longer remember why you found anything funny in it at all, it just looks tragic. There is enough subtle humour throughout the film, at just the right places, to break up what would otherwise be overwhelmingly tragic and bleak subject matter. And third, the realism. These characters behave the way three real people, in the real world, would behave. Yes, they are foolhardy, yes, they are reckless, and yes, they are probably very lucky to be alive at certain points in the movie, but they never seem anything less than human at any point.

The Hunting Party is both a fascinating character study of a man who does not know how to stop being a reporter, and an eye-opening look at the way the CIA, the UN and other world agencies pay lip service to war criminals and the architects of genocide without ever really doing anything about them. It is, indeed, a must-watch. So watch it!