THE HUNT

In fact, both factions boast a badass babe out to defend the cause of their personal fight. For the hunters, Athena (two-time Oscar winner and one-time 'The Next Karate Kid' Swank) leads the charge for the conscientious killers looking to eradicate the deplorable peons during the hunt. Swank is, as always, great.

Zobel ('Compliance', 'Z for Zachariah') directed 'The Hunt' from a screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, a seeming trio of talent, although I am very sceptical that Lindelof was a 50/50 co-writer of the script with Cuse. While I find Lindelof's work to be overrated, he doesn't seem like someone who just makes random shit like this. "Okay, I just finished 'The Leftovers', a piercing three-season meditation on loss, grief, forgiveness, redemption and the necessity of human connection. Soon, I've got to start on 'Watchmen', which I'm going to turn into a commentary on racial injustice and its inherited traumas. What should I do between those two shows? Aha! Movie about liberal elites hunting ordinary Americans." No, this feels more like: "Damo, your mate Cuse's script is crap but we gotta start shooting in a week. Can you just go over it once and make any improvements?"

There are some echoes of 'Surviving the Game', 'The Purge' and 'Hostel: Part II' in there, but the movie isn't nearly as infuriating as we were led to believe. Yes, Zobel's film does pit liberals against MAGA types, but it makes fun of both sides so much that it's almost hard to be offended. The people of the hunt are caricatures: conspiracy theorists, big-game hunters, rednecks, gun nuts, social justice warriors, and "libtards" (just typing out these words gives me social media fatigue). Whatever controversy was supposed to be there, by making these characters such exaggerated ends of the political spectrum, it takes away any bite the film could have had.

Unlike Jordan Peel's 'Get Out' or Rian Johnson's 'Knives Out' (which was much more plausible about the faults of liberals and how they actually manifest), the satirical shock value in 'The Hunt' feels sketchy and slight because the film is unable to tap into the realm of bottomless cynicism to help along with its subversive overtones. Instead, 'The Hunt' is fortified with convenient jabs and lukewarm jokes saturated in a goofy-minded gorefest, like Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's 'Ready or Not' or the best Uwe Boll films.

The film drifts apart as the proceedings progress and the plot is explained, while the cat-and-mouse element to the storyline loses momentum, especially when the slaughtered combatants become secondary to the skull-cracking defiance of Crystal. Christopher Smith explored similar territory more effectively with his film 'Severance', which saw the low-level employees of a multinational arms-trading company on a "team-building" weekend in the Balkans being menaced by Russian war criminals.

Condescending liberals lashing out at conservative cronies and their right-wing leanings should have made for some enjoyably edgy satire, but 'The Hunt' is merely a by-the-numbers comedy-horror-suspense thriller that has a few punchy moments. However, if production company Blumhouse wants to remake a bunch of 90s Jean-Claude Van Damme action movies with Betty Gilpin in the lead role, I think I'd be down with that. I'd watch them, not in the theatres obviously, but late at night on Netflix after a few beers.