Apolitical Purge: "The Hunt" a cheeky, unapologetically unsubtle delivery system of satirical roasts, bloody carnage and the great Betty Gilpin

The Hunt (2020) 

89 min.

Screened on March 10, 2020 at Landmark Ritz East in Philadelphia, PA

Release Date: March 13, 2020 (Wide)

Fated to be the movie that was pulled from its September 2019 release slot after consecutive shootings in the U.S. and received blowback from President Trump via Twitter, “The Hunt” is saddled with just a little pre-release baggage. Though the film will remain to have its detractors sight unseen, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse have taken it upon themselves to lean heavily on the tongue-in-cheek satire in the ad campaign and shrewdly sell their hot potato as, “the most talked about movie of the year [is one] that no one’s actually seen.” Now having actually seen the film from start to finish, “The Hunt” provokes and takes chances as an entertainingly hyper-violent, satirically pointed equal-opportunity offender. Director Craig Zobel—who made quite the incendiary stir with his brilliantly hot-button 2012 debut “Compliance”—examines dehumanization again, this time blithely skewering the political divide with writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (2015’s “Tomorrowland”). If it didn't boast such a wickedly irreverent sense of humor and a sly, kick-ass secret weapon in Betty Gilpin, “The Hunt” would feel more queasily plausible and closer in step with Blumhouse's own "Purge" franchise, but it happily has both.

Every left-winger on Athena’s (Hilary Swank) text thread is under fire for joking about an upcoming “hunt” at "The Manor," as in liberal “elites” hunting right-wing “deplorables” for sport. Not long after, a dozen strangers—war vets, rednecks, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, some of them played by Emma Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Justin Hartley, and Ike Barinholtz—wake up with their mouths gagged in a clearing. No one knows how they got there or why, but some of them point out that their situation resembles an online Q’Anon-type conspiracy theory called “Manorgate.” Once a giant wooden crate in the middle of the field is opened, a trove of weaponry is revealed, but they soon come under fire and some of them immediately get their guts pumped full of lead. One of the survivors is a Mississippi woman named Crystal (Betty Gilpin), emerging as the smartest and most exceedingly competent out of anyone, and she would rather use her primal instincts than open her mouth.

From the start of the “Most Dangerous Game”-like setup, “The Hunt” is fiercely unpredictable and ghoulishly funny, as a disposable character has their eyeball gouged out by a stiletto heel in the first five minutes. There’s a ballsy, anything-can-happen readiness to when and how the filmmakers dispatch familiar, even famous, faces in bloody, over-the-top, surprisingly cheeky ways; it is ensured that characters don’t have to be played by an unknown to become cannon fodder right away. Audience expectations continue to be subverted once Crystal shows up at the gas station owned by Ma (Amy Madigan) and Pop (Reed Birney), who clearly aren’t who they seem, and Crystal clearly isn’t the simpleton the hunters thought. To support Cuse and Lindelof’s specifically heightened tone of their script, all of the characters who aren’t named Crystal are on-target as extreme, narrow-minded caricatures that represent both political sides. Not squarely anti-conservative or anti-liberal, the film is truly fair and balanced, as no one across the ideological spectrum is coddled or left un-mocked. One of the “deplorables” calls another a “snowflake,” even when impaled on a spike. Shots are taken at a superior liberal mindset, Athena’s NPR-listening, charity-backing elite group one-upping each other in political correctness and wokeness by overtly using buzzwords (i.e. "appropriation," "problematic," etc.) and debating on gender or racial phrasing. 

Taking the lead and afforded the least jerkiness as enigmatic badass Crystal, a revelatory Betty Gilpin (2019’s “Isn’t It Romantic”) proves herself an awesome, no-fucks-to-give force to be reckoned with. From the physical demands to her comedic chops and endearing Southern drawl, it is a killer, one-of-a-kind performance from Gilpin, keeping Crystal’s true self and political affiliation a mystery—she is, however, well-read on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”—and surprising with deadpan, sneakily hilarious line delivery and loopy facial expressions. The way in which Gilpin recites a twisted bedtime story about the jack rabbit and the box turtle that Crystal's mama used to tell her is just one example of several acting choices that are chilling, strange and hard to forget. On the “hunter” side, Hilary Swank is only heard and seen from the back for the first hour (even though the ads give away her alleged stunt casting), but she is dynamite as the icy, self-righteous Athena. 

Provocative and unapologetically unsubtle, “The Hunt” keeps reinventing itself over a fast-and-furious 89-minute running time, like if a Twitter or Reddit feud between trolls escalated into a violent free-for-all. As a genre film, it’s a crowd-pleasing survival thriller with plenty of carnage. The final big sequence—a brutally no-holds-barred, expertly choreographed knock-down, drag-out smackdown between Crystal and Athena—is a glass-breaking all-timer. It rivals Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox’s knife fight in “Kill Bill: Volume One,” only this one delightfully begins with the preparation of a Gruyère grilled cheese and ends with a satisfying bite. As a roast-‘em-all social satire, it’s daring and acerbic when it needs to be, but overall, it’s best to block out the noise of all the pre-release hubbub that just simultaneously inflates and deflates the film’s worth. Director Craig Zobel and scribes Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof made “The Hunt” into exactly the movie they wanted to make: a digestible hybrid of spry, blood-spurting entertainment and galvanizing food for thought that can’t help but make one laugh at some of the smug and/or uninformed idiocy on both the left and right.

Grade: B +