Powerful

hyped garbage

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

If its a comedy and I don't even smile a bit in 15/20 minutes. Im out

War is no party. Not even a hunting one. Neither are consequences of war, or trying to make justice and catch war criminals. The Hunting Party written and directed by Richard Shephard whose Matador I have seen a few weeks ago (and liked much more) is good action entertainment, but if you know nothing about the Balkans and the Balkan wars and you rely on this movie in order to get an idea about the tragedies and atrocities that happened 20 years ago in that part of Europe, you can get a distorted image about the region and the history.Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) is a TV reporter who was once famous. While covering the war in Bosnia he had a nervous breakdown during a live coverage of the war atrocities, which cost him his job. A few years later he will be back in the country apparently healing from the wounds of war, trying together with his ex-cameraman (Terrence Howard) and the young apprentice in journalism (Jessee Eisenberg) who happens to be the son of one of the VPs of the TV network they used to work for, to find one of the most famous war criminals who escapes international justice, UN forces and all the spying agencies. No need to say, they will succeed in a few days where all the big fellows failed for years.Judged only as an action movie The Hunting Party is not a bad movie at all. Richard Shephard has a sure hand, and Richard Gere is more than credible in the role of the journalist whose life is turned upside down by war and becomes a war criminals hunter. He actually is the only character that has a motivation to do it in the script, why the other two get attracted into the mortal game is a mystery. There is a big problem with describing such a complex conflict as the Balkan wars through the simplistic simplistic perspective of an action movie, not only because the script takes parts on national lines, but also because many better films have already been made by Serbian, Croat, Bosnian directors about this complex conflict. Films with real dramas, true humans, good guys and villains, not vaudeville ones. In a tentative to distance the story from the action B-movies the heroes see on TV screens on a couple of instances Chuck Norris jumping out of the water to kill the bad guys in one of the flicks of the genre. Unfortunately, this is not enough. The Hunting Party is just by a bit better than the Chuck Norris movies.

To make a commercially viable film out of a far-from attractive scenario, this film has resorted to low-brow slightly comedic buddy-ism.The three stars, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg are so dissimilar, both as actors as in characters - Gere, the silver-haired fox is a drunken senior news reporter who seriously messed up live on air and now has a bounty to find and an axe to grind; Howard, who is black and was Gere's cameraman but since Gere's sacking has been promoted and now has a cushy job and a playing away gorgeous wife. And, the usually very watchable and enjoyable Eisenberg is now a mumbling nerd of a first-time abroad reporter, given the chance only as he's directly related to the vice-president of the TV company.This all sits at odds with the aftermath of the Serb-Croat war and jam- packed into the 100mins running time, is everything from Playboy James Bond, gritty action and soppily stringed pathos. Lots of shuttling back and fore along with the realistic tracking down of 'The Fox', a war criminal wanted by the U.N. These scenes are the sort that shout out for Jean Reno, gruff and mean, not laughably smug Gere and cowardly Eisenberg.Lots of serious issues are dealt with and even more discouraging are the end credits - the usual, serious warning about still-at-large war criminals and the disturbing facts and figures are followed immediately by a sort of Shrek-style comedic take out on what each of the characters then went on to do.To say that this dilutes the film's purpose is an understatement and the reason for my 5/10. For action fans, it's not a bad movie and those who just want to leave their brains in the pub, then it's got some mileage and is entertaining enough and would score 6 or even 7/10.

Without getting into plot-revealing details, this movie plays to clichés and stereotypes for about an hour and then truly falls apart. For the first 80 minutes or so the script is more or less based on events written up by journalist Scott Anderson for the October 2000 issue of Esquire, and then in the end it falls off the cliff towards a wholly imaginary, unconvincing and throughly uninspired all's-well-that-ends-well conclusion. The first part is relatively watchable but meddles too much with the number, motives and characters of the protagonists to ring true. It fails from the very beginning to convey why war journalists would choose to pursue such a dangerous profession, what kinds of personal relationships they might develop with Bosnian and Serbian locals, how they would respond when coming across dead bodies of unknown victims or people known to them, or how they would act when faced immediately after with the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. Instead, we are supposed to think that war journalism is mostly about thrill-seeking and being recognized "in the whole world" as "the best" at your game, or that courage and resolve in the face of life-threatening danger can only come from a desire to avenge personal loss of the most hackneyed kind. These same journalists are apparently incapable of discretion but instead have loud and revealing conversations in places where they could easily be overheard, while the incredibly terrible leader of the evildoers is surrounded by psychopathic henchmen, yet easily caught off guard and chased around the landscape by unarmed pursuers (who seem to somehow know the local forest a lot better than he does). The concluding part of the story does not even try to come up with any detailed plot or dialog, but relies instead on voice-overs, fast-forwards and wholly trivial lines lacking any genuine punch. The one aspect that struck me as well done is the documentary-like cinematography and imagery, with rich colors and relatively gritty contrast.