The film was released on March 14, 2003. It received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $46 million against its $55 million budget.
Plot
The movie begins with Aaron Hallam, a Delta Force operator, fighting as part of a unit in the war in Kosovo. Infiltrating a mosque, he successfully assassinates a genocidal Serbian military leader. Hallam is awarded the Silver Star for this act, but is left traumatized by the atrocities he witnessed.
In Silver Falls State Park, Oregon, Hallam encounters two apparent deer hunters with expensive high-powered sniper rifles. He accuses them of not being genuine hunters due to their usage of guns and scopes. The two men pursue him, but are no match for his tactics/traps and are brutally murdered.
Meanwhile, L.T. Bonham, a former civilian survival and combat instructor for spec ops soldiers, lives in a secluded cabin deep in British Columbia. He finds a white wolf caught in a snare, frees it, treats its injury, then tracks down and knocks out the man who set it in a bar, warning his buddies not to use them again.
Sometime later, Bonham is approached by the FBI, who asks him to help apprehend the perpetrator of the killings. Bonham agrees and joins the FBI task force led by Abby Durrell. Arriving at the crime scene, he proves that one man with a knife was responsible for the hunters’s deaths, not several men with hatchets as previously believed by the agents. Bonham convinces Abby to let him track the killer on his own, but she insists that he take an FBI radio.
Bonham discovers Hallam's personal effects in a small cave just before the assassin appears, and recognizes him as one of his students. Hallam asks Bonham why he never answered the letters he sent, but Bonham demands to know why Hallam killed those hunters. His protege explains that he believes the men were “sweepers” sent by the government to eliminate him. Bonham fails to talk Hallam into surrendering, and the two of them come to blows before Hallam is tranquilized and taken into custody by the FBI, who tracked his teacher’s radio.
During his interrogation, Aaron is uncooperative, rambling about the slaughter of chickens, and how humans would feel if they were in the same position. He only wants to talk to L.T, who urges him not to discuss his covert operations. When questioned by Abby, Bonham admits that his father prevented him from joining the military after his brother was killed in the Vietnam War to avoid losing another son. L.T followed his father’s footsteps and became a tracker before being contracted by the Armed Forces.
The FBI is then forced to hand Hallam over to three of his fellow operators led by Dale Hewitt, who arrives with a letter authorizing them to take Hallam. Hewitt tells them that Hallam lost control during a mission that came after the war in Kosovo, killing numerous innocent civilians, and that he cannot stand trial because his military assignments are classified. While being transported, Aaron, upon learning that he will be summarily executed to ensure his silence, manages to kill the operatives and escape.
Alerted to the incident, Bonham and the FBI search for Hallam. Bonham finds him at the house of his ex-girlfriend and her daughter in Portland, Oregon. The two have a tense stare-down and stand-off, but Hallam flees after Abby arrives to apprehend him. Bonham follows him out of the window, and narrowly dodges a car Aaron stole from the garage. Later, in a wooden compartment, Durell and Bonham find Hallam’s silver star and a letter accusing L.T of sending the aforementioned hunters to kill him, confirming his paranoid mental state.
Relentlessly chased by the FBI, his former instructor, and the Portland Police Bureau, Hallam flees into a sewer. There, he ambushes and kills Harry Van Zandt, Abby’s Boss, as well as her partner and friend Bobby Moret, before escaping by boarding a streetcar to blend in. The police block the bridge, and he takes a hostage at knife-point to escape from Bonham. Eventually, Aaron climbs to and then dives off the top of the bridge, fleeing upstream.
Abby, devastated and wanting revenge for her fallen colleagues, intends to deploy the full force of the FBI into the woods in search of Hallam. Bonham protests this, asserting that sending more agents after Hallam will only result in further bloodshed, and unsuccessfully argues that he is the only one who can stop the renegade soldier he trained.
Resurfacing up the river, Hallam crafts a knife out of reclaimed metal, and Bonham crafts a knife out of stone and enters the wilderness alone to search. Bonham is caught by one of Hallam's traps and is thrown down a waterfall. He meets his student at the bottom, and they engage in hand-to-hand combat. The two sustain severe injuries, and Bonham’s knife is broken, but he gains the upper hand and fatally stabs Hallam with his own knife just as Abby and the FBI arrive.
Bonham, mostly recovered, returns to his home in British Columbia. He rereads and then burns Hallam's aforementioned letters that expressed his concerns over the things he witnessed during his military service. Going outside to get more firewood, Bonham spots the same white wolf he saved earlier running through the snow, watches it contemplatively.
The hand-to-hand combat and knife fighting in the film featured Filipino Martial Arts. Thomas Kier and Rafael Kayanan of Sayoc Kali were brought in by Benicio del Toro.[4] They were credited as knife fight choreographers for the film.
Reception
Box office
The box office for the film was less than its reported production budget of $55 million.[5]The Hunted opened on March 14, 2003, at #3 in 2,516 theaters across North America and grossed $13.48 million during its opening weekend.[6] It went on to gross $34,244,097 in North America and $11,252,437 internationally markets for a worldwide total of $45,496,534.[5]
Buena Vista International handles the distribution in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Netherlands and parts of Latin America.
In United Kingdom - Redbus Film Distribution handles distribution under the name Helkon SK. It was released on 6 June 2003 (despite being renamed to Redbus on 6 May 2003).
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 29% of 149 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.7/10.The website's consensus reads: "An all too familiar chase movie that's not worth the talents involved."[7]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 40 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale.
Many reviewers noted striking similarities to First Blood, with which this film was unfavorably compared. Rolling Stone called it "Just a Rambo rehash."[9] While there was some praise for the cinematography and the action scenes, much criticism was directed at the thin plot and characterization, and the general implausibility. Rex Reed of the New York Observer called it a "Ludicrous, plotless, ho-hum tale of lurid confrontation."[citation needed] The UK magazine, Total Film said the film was "scarcely exciting to watch."[10]
However, the film also received praise from other high-profile critics, particularly for the fact it kept the special effects and stunts restrained. For example, Roger Ebert said, "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 with Friedkin's characters."[11] He reviewed the film on his own site and scored it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.[11]Time Out London was also positive saying, "Friedkin's lean, mean thriller shows itself more interested in process than context, subtlety and character development pared away in favour of headlong momentum and crunching set pieces."[12]
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