#The hunted knife movie#

Notice scenes where Del Toro is interrogated by other law officials. The screenplay, by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli, has a kind of minimalist clarity, in which nobody talks too much and everything depends on tone. 'The Hunted' requires its skilled actors. We feel their physical effort this isn't one of those movies where shirts are dry again in the next scene, and the hero has the breath for long speeches. Running, hiding, stalking, the two men get dirty and tired and gasp for breath. The leaves are not scenery but right in front of our faces, to be brushed aside. The forests are wet and green, muddy and detailed. The cinematography, by the great Caleb Deschanel (' The Right Stuff') buries itself in the reality of the locations. The chase sequences-through Oregon forests and city streets, on highways and bridges-are also reality-oriented. We are involved in the immediate, exhausting, draining physical work of fighting. 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. Their blows land solidly, with pain on both sides. They live in a world of gravity-free speed-up. We've seen so many fancy high-tech computer-assisted fight scenes in recent movies that we assume the fighters can fly.

#The hunted knife movie#

What makes the movie fresh is that it doesn't stand back and regard its pursuit as an exercise, but stays very close to the characters and focuses on the actual physical reality of their experience.Ĭonsider an early hand-to-hand combat between Bonham and Hallam. Here the whole movie is a chase, sometimes at a crawl, as when Hallam drives a stolen car directly into a traffic jam. No modern director is more identified with chases that Friedkin, whose ' The French Connection' and 'To Live and Die in L.A.' set the standard. Of course, in killing the hunters, he has promoted himself to that superior lifeform, but this is not a movie about debate points.

Hallam's stress syndrome has made him into a radical defender of animal rights he talks about chickens on assembly lines, and asks one cop how he'd feel if a higher life form were harvesting mankind. Back home in Oregon, offended by hunters using telescopic sights, he claims four victims-'those hunters were filleted like deer.' Bonham recognizes the style and goes into the woods after him ('If I'm not back in two days, that will mean I'm dead').

One of his students is Aaron Hallam ( Benicio Del Toro), who fought in Kosovo in 1999 and had experiences there that warped him ('his battle stress has gone so deep it is part of his personality').