North Texas Daily

The fact that this is the last movie I will watch in a movie theater for a long time is truly sad.

2020 has seen a mix of horror movies — some great, like “The Invisible Man” and “The Lodge,” and some not-so-great, like “The Turning” and “Gretel & Hansel.” I feel like that goes for all horror movies. Some are triumphant in their own right, transcending the genre and sometimes even reviving it. Some are so bad they are enjoyable and become a cult-classic as the years go by. Unfortunately there are some horror movies that are so in the middle and bland, and by the time the credits are down scrolling, you have already forgotten the main character’s name. That movie is “The Hunt.”

This movie is so empty. It failed at finding its own identity. This is like a bad mix of “The Hunger Games” and “The Purge,” two franchises that are not all that good in the first place. The movie attempts to be a satirical take on “woke culture,” but it quickly devolves into a lazy thriller with one of the most predictable plots I have seen in recent memory.

Here is my best analogy — when you build a table, you need four legs to hold it up. For a thriller movie you need tension, along with a crisp script with twists and turns. You also need some memorable characters, and the last thing is the shock factor that will freeze the audience in their seats. If a leg of the table is missing, it will still stand, but it won’t be as great as the completed table. When two or more legs are missing, the table is not of any use. “The Hunt” is missing all four legs of the table and nothing was better in this movie than when the screen went to black and the credits began to crawl.

No performance in this movie was worth caring about. I found the eventual lead of the movie, Betty Gilpin (Crystal), to have a few moments of charm here and there. But at the end of the day, there are a hundred other “final girl” characters that are written better, while also maintaining a spot in my memory that lasted longer than ten minutes.

I usually find myself rooting for someone in a movie like this, but there was not one character I connected with. Everyone in this movie is a scumbag in their own regard, which I think can take the audience out of the movie. I also think the director, Craig Zobel, did not do a thorough enough job of smoothing out his stance on the matter. It can be confusing, at times, who we are supposed to be rooting for, and even if the point was to root for nobody, the movie suffered greatly because of it.

Normally, satires are supposed to be funny, at least a little bit. I didn’t find myself laughing once, not even ironically. Every effortless joke fell flat and every bit of humor missed by a mile. This movie does not know what it is. It takes so many elements from so many well-known horror classics, so when you see it in “The Hunt,” you sit back and go, “Hey wait a minute, that happened in that other movie!”

At the end of the day, it is a forgettable film and there are so many other movies out right now worth seeing over this one.

Final rating: 2/5

Featured Illustration: Austin Banzon