I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Jake (Josh Stewart) is a great hunter from "By God" West Virginia... or was it West "By God" Virginia. He wants to start his own hunting TV series called "The Tree Hugger" as he spends most of his time in a deer stand. He has a professional camera man friend as they head out to deer camp. They are hunting a newly opened area, one that has a huge buck nicknamed, "Movie Star."There is an early clue as to what is about to happen, although the title isn't clear until later. Kudos to DVD cover guys for not revealing any plot spoilers.Some of the film was fine, but other footage, such as watching the trailer hitch, left something to be desired. Much of the film is found footage, while some is not, and I wish they did the herky-jerky ending in the "not" group. What it really looks like is that Josh works at Cabela's and got a bunch of hunting gear sponsors to make them an 87 minute commercial we would pay to watch.Guide: 1 F-bomb. No sex or nudity

William Friedkin's The Hunted has a simple enough concept, elevated by gorgeous cinematography among beautiful locations, solid work from its two leads, and a lean, mean aesthetic that slices all the unnecessary fat of its running time to deliver a sleek, brutal, very intimate cat and mouse thriller of visceral energy and a nice balance of machismo and feral, damaged vulnerability. In the mountainous woods of the Pacific Northwest, Washington/British Columbia area, an ex special ops soldier (Benicio Del Toro), suffering from PTSD, is slaughtering hunters like game, like a ghost among the trees. The powers that be enlist an ex military sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones), who happens to be the one who trained him, to find and stop him. In some hands this could have turned into a ridiculous, over the top bloodbath. But Friedkin's takes his time with these two, letting us see the unnerving way Del Toro comes unravelled, and the buried guilt and reluctant obligation that manifest in Jones. Del Toro is always just great in anything, period. The man just isn't capable of sub par work. Here he's a desperate, confused she'll of a human, bound by his misfiring synapses and corrupted soul into committing these heinous deeds, and you can see that caged animal in his eyes, a predator unbound from inhibition or the sanctioned order of protocol. He's lost it, and Del Toro understands that, giving us a measured, psychological take, instead of taking the easy way out and hamming it up like many actors would. Jones is a slow burn as he starts to realize what he's dealing with, and rises to the occasion magnificently. The film progresses into some purely exhilarating knife fight stand offs between the two, set against the raging waterfalls, lush mountainsides and unforgiving terrain of the North. The fights are just so well done. There's a breathless frenzy to the bloodletting, with sequences devoid of pointless stunt work or unnecessary fireworks, stripped away to these two warriors, with homemade stone shivs, battling at the most primal, personal level. These scenes hit hard, and above all are fun for any true fan of survival action.

A soldier (Benicio del Toro) with PTSD takes to the Portland, Oregon woods in Rambo-like fashion. He's paranoid and kills a couple of businessmen from nearby Medford who were weekend deer hunters. The soldier believed the men were CIA spooks sent to find him. The film reveals that he's a Special Forces operator named Aaron Hallam who is AWOL. Hallam is shown to be haunted by his service during the Kosovo War, where he assassinated high priority targets with his hand-forged combat knife. The knife and others like it were forged by Hallam and the others he trained with and is a weapon of significance in the film. An FBI-led manhunt manhunt begins with Special Agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), who's assisted by L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones). Bonham was a civilian survival and combatives expert who instructed Hallam during his advanced training. Bonham is a recluse but the FBI bring him into the investigation as a consultant. He's able to identify the specific type of knife and footwear, a moccasin with no tread, used by the killer. It turns out Hallam felt a paternal connection to Bonham that the latter didn't reciprocate. Bonham reveals during a conversation with Durrell that he was never in the armed forces because his father, an Army colonel, had kept him from enlisting after his older brother was killed in Vietnam. His father was also an outdoorsman and survivalist who taught Bonham everything he knew. Hallam becomes more violent and dangerous as the manhunt for him tightens and increases in size. Bonham and Hallam are forced to confront each other in a strange almost kung fu movie style student-mentor battle. There are a few problems I had with this movie. Why would a Special Forces soldier have a hand-forged knife as his only weapon? If the FBI and police had arrested an armed and dangerous fugitive with specialized military training wouldn't he be in a maximum security lock up? A civilian would probably not be allowed to interrogate him either. Oh, well. The Oregon wilderness of Silver Falls State Park where the wilderness scenes were shot is magnificently beautiful. The combat is intense and well-choreographed. It was base on the Filipino martial art of Kali. Kali relies on close-quarters grappling, striking, stick and of course knife fighting. It resembles the close combat style featured in the Bourne films with Matt Damon.

Well, I'm not surprised The Hunted wasn't nominated for any Oscar of any kind (it might well have stood a chance for Most Dramatic Use of Coincidence Involving Scenic Locations In and Around Portland, but there you go), but if you don't expect high art it's a decent enough stab at keeping you entertained for an hour and a half.For one thing it stars Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro and both have that uncanny and enviable knack of breathing life into the most unpromising of material, so you won't feel short-changed. But when all is said and done The Hunted is just one more chase film and apart from the long chase you don't get much else.There is a very half-hearted stab at suggesting some kind of father and son relationship between Lee Jones, the hunter, and Del Toro, his prey, but it is so lightly sketched and so utterly lightweight that you can safely ignore it.Lee Jones is given to us as an expert in unarmed combat who, though not a military man, had trained grunts to become ruthless killers ('Once you can kill mentally, the physical killing is easy' or some such hokum he comes out with at one point), and Del Toro was one of his star pupils.The whole thing begins with and extended sequence of genocide by Serbian troops in Kosovo in which, surprisingly, a group of US bods are aiming to assassinate a Serbian commander - with Del Toro eventually doing the deed - and this is obviously intended by way of 'explaining' why he became such a ruthless killer.I don't know why they bothered, to be honest, because given the rest of the film, in which Del Toro's psychological make-up is presented at a first grade, pretty shallow, level, it wasn't really needed. There's a thin plot strand of 'the woman and her daughter' Del Toro is apparently close to, but that, too, is pretty superficial.I seem to be damning the whole exercise, and I don't mean to. This is pretty ludicrous hokum but the ride itself is enjoyable enough, and, as I say, Lee Jones - where does he get the energy? - and Del Toro are worth the price of admission themselves, so if this comes your way, give it a whirl as long as you keep those grander expectations in check.