The Hunted

and tight direction make The Hunted well worth a look.....The excellent Benicio Del Toro (Traffic, Snatch, The Usual Suspects) is a highly trained, super skilled elite commando who cracks after a gruesome mission in war torn Kosovo.....slightly creepy tone that puts it several notches above the standard straight-to-video action fare.....Though the plot is strangely similar to the action classic First Blood, director William Friedken (The Exorcist, The French Connection) keeps things well under control.... ... Full Review

And The Hunted is a mess, no matter it got that way.....As if this stroll down memory lane isn't daunting enough, the first visuals are equally momentous, subtitled....None of the characters is particularly compelling or committed....It begins in a rage, with those ominous, painfully self-important lines from Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," recited by Johnny Cash Himself (currently in brilliant resurrection in his single-and-video, a cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt").....Benicio Del Toro looks appropriate ... Full Review

The Hunted is confused, no matter it got that way.....Truth be told, The Hunted is nothing like a masterpiece, but Friedkin's commentary track almost redeems it.....The film's disarray is structural as well:....Indeed, The Hunted is increasingly unwieldy.....While this shifting of focus might allow for an intriguing ambiguity of moral ground, the film lapses instead into a muggy lack of perspective..... ... Full Review

The Barbarian Invasions The best film Ive seen so far this year! Together A beautiful, moving film. The Hunted The Hunted is one of the first bright spots on the movie horizon this year, an action thriller thats genuinely exciting . ... Full Review

Okay, so this tremulous persona makes a pleasant change from Tommy Lees rough, gruff Marshal Sam Gerard in The Fugitive and US Marshals, but you cant help thinking thats why hes timid: to try to distract from The Hunteds borrowings. Academy Award winners Del Toro and Jones are, with few exceptions, running, violent automatons like the androids in Westworld, and the gorgeous Nielsen is as drab as a seaside town in November. ... Full Review

A laughably bad action movie, with an overall rating bumped up only by the obvious capability of the actors involved -....The Hunted" isn't the worst movie of the year.... ... Full Review

Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro are immensely talented actors who have made great films and made films great. Del Toro's a former special ops commando who's flipped his lid and turned into a maniac fond of tracking down hunters in the woods of the northwest and giving them a grisly taste of their own medicine. ... Full Review

As an action-thriller that spends most of its time depicting the high-stakes chase between Bonham and Hallam, "The Hunted" is crackerjack entertainment.....Aggressive and unrelenting, "The Hunted" is an indelible chase picture that doesn't shy away from the realism of its situations..... ... Full Review

Friedkin is a director who likes bad heroes and appealing villains, but in "The Hunted Bonham, who's quirky and likable in Jones' performance, has never killed anyone himself. ... Full Review

But the violence in "The Hunted" doesn't illuminate the characters, who are both thimble-deep, and it doesn't make us reflect on the cost or nature of violence. There is a Proustian madeleine in "The Hunted," and fittingly, it comes right at the beginning -- a nighttime sequence, set in 1999, during the fighting in Kosovo, in which we see Serbian soldiers slaughtering civilians while U.S. forces slither covertly through the carnage, trying to locate and kill a Serbian officer. ... Full Review