Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hunt’ on Peacock, a Violent Mess of a Free-For-All Political Satire

The Hunt debuted roughly one million years ago, March 13, 2020, just before pandemic shutdowns began, and now it’s fresh on Peacock, for anyone with carbon-dating technology to watch. A political satire rife with supergross violence, the movie was a pre-COVID controversy, scuttled from its 2019 release date by mass shootings and Trump-inspired criticism for its shit-stirring plot about rich libs sport-hunting redneck righties, prompting the marketing department to devise a reactionary tagline: “The most talked about movie of the year is one that no one’s actually seen.” They had a point, and by “they” we mean prolific genre-flick production house Blumhouse, director Craig Zobel (who just helmed all episodes of Mare of Eastown) and writers Damon Lindelof (Lost and Watchmen firebrand) and Nick Cuse. Well, now we have a chance to see it with the benefit of hindsight, which will help us determine if pre-COVID, pre-racial-reckoning, pre-2020-election, pre-Jan. 6-resurrection politics seem laughably quaint, hauntingly prescient or some combination thereof.

THE HUNT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A pretentious jerk condescends to a stewardess on a private jet. Something about caviar and champagne. Suddenly, a man wearing a lot of rugged denim stumbles drooling into the passenger cabin, and the pretentious jerk puts a hole in his jugular with an ink pen. Against the odds, such a maneuver doesn’t kill him, so a woman whose face we don’t see Single White Females Denim Guy, then calmly plucks his eyeball from the spike. The scene is played for laughs and shock value, and I’m not sure if I didn’t laugh because it seems like I’ve seen this type of winking and snarky bloodshed before many times or because I’m too much of a boring and responsible adult to be amused by it. But it’s definitely played for laughs.

CUT TO: The woods somewhere. A blonde woman played by Emma Roberts, and dubbed “Yoga Pants” in the credits, awakens, gagged and disoriented. She looks over yonder and spies another gagged woman (Betty Gilpin), and follows her to an open field where other gagged folks make their way to a big crate. It contains a clothed pig, which may be a symbol or a metaphor or something, a bunch of guns and machetes and other weapons, and the key to the padlocks on their gags. Suddenly, a shot rings out, and Emma Roberts’ head explodes, presumably totally ruining her yoga pants. A lady tries to book it outta there but falls in a pit full of spikes and is impaled; a guy rescues her but as they make their way up a path he steps on a landmine and little bits of them go flying in all directions, north and south, and right and left, no doubt.

It soon becomes apparent that these people are gun nuts, shitposters, conspiracy theorists and other such righties. It also becomes apparent that Gilpin Lady is a highly trained, half-Wick Afghanistan vet, and possibly a sociopath, because she can think AND kill her way out of precarious situations. She sort of but not really befriends a doof named Gary (Ethan Suplee) who likes to tell everyone he has a podcast on which he’s been exposing the truth about liberal elites who hunt conservatives for sport, which sure seems to be happening right now. She also sort of but not really allies with a ballcapped Hannity fan named Don (Wayne Duvall), and runs across a tracksuited character dubbed “Vanilla Nice” in the credits, played by Sturgill Simpson with a Florida state tat on his face. Will they get to the bottom of this. Who will survive. What is the truth. Who is right and who is wrong. Wait, isn’t Hilary Swank in this. Yes she is. But saying more would be a SPOILER, and I ain’t in that business, baby.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Hunt is The Most Dangerous Game meets The Purge, smeared with a thick layer of South Park-style all-directions satirical anarchy.

Performance Worth Watching: Gilpin’s character is the only one here with anything resembling a point-of-view. She manages to be winking and earnest — and even if you hate the movie, you might love her wily, smart performance.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m gonna eat a whole pie!” — what a woman with a spike through her midsection blurts out, perhaps not realizing they may be her last words

Sex and Skin: None: TBATEIAIAATF: Too Busy Asserting That Everyone In America Is An Asshole To F—.

Our Take: I’m tempted to call The Hunt a nostalgia exercise here in 2021, where the movie exists to remind us of an America that was slightly less hopelessly deeply and painfully culturally divided. The filmmakers oscillate between asympathetic points-of-view before settling into Gilpin’s character just enough to perk our interest in something beyond easy jabs at lefties (NPR and Ava DuVernay-liked-my-tweet jokes) and easy jabs at righties (“I have a podcast!”, “I have seven guns!”) and easy jabs at social media and easy jabs at The Media, all couched in the type of OTT extreme gore that tells us not to take any of this seriously, and then here, take this elbow in the ribs and then take an aspirin for the headache you’ll get when you fruitlessly attempt to ascertain anything resembling thematic coherence from the text.

You might skewer the film on a false-equivalence pike, and you might have a point, but isn’t that just something some annoying liberal might say? Doesn’t matter if that’s a valid point, because EVERYTHING deserves to be ridiculed! Who cares about anything — let’s just sit back and laugh as one character says, “You don’t really care about the truth, do you?” and another character replies, “Of course I do. The only difference is, I’m right.” And then the two characters fight each other in an isn’t-that-person-losing-a-lot-of-blood-from-that-perforated-bowel sequence that’s so impressively directed and choreographed, we almost forget that the movie is really doesn’t have anything interesting to say or do beyond the exploitation of political division for cheap, albeit rousing thrills.

The script is just LOADED with hot-button phraseology — “crisis actors,” “cultural appropriation,” “snowflakes,” “cucks,” etc., but not “cancel culture,” because that didn’t really catch fire until several months after the movie was released — cribbed from the most annoying social media posts ever. The film is a series of reactions, overreactions and overreactions to overreactions, and never rises above the milieu, as if not a single component of American culture is worth salvaging. It ultimately drags down Gilpin, whose character is a mess, strangely sympathetic while also irredeemable; someone give her a better vehicle, and while you’re at it, give Zobel an action film worthy of his clever, assured direction. The Hunt is entertaining but despairing, and also a quickly dated mess, prompting one to yearn for something more subtle, like Borat or a punch in the nose.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Hey everyone, The Hunt wants us to know that everything sucks and isn’t worth it!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch The Hunt on HBO Max