The Hunted [2003]

February 21, 2025

I don’t know how I’ve missed this movie despite it featuring many of the things I usually look for but I obviously did. Until now. The Hunted is a bit messy but still entertaining action thriller about a Special Forces instructor trying to capture his best pupil. It’s definitely one of those pop-corn actioners requiring zero brain effort and offering enough fun to warrant a viewing. After all, the crew here is simply superb. The director is one of my favorites, the great William Friedkin (To Live and Die in L.A., The Exorcist, Sorcerer). He did a solid job here considering the material he had at his disposal. I know it’s going to sound strange when I say that The Hunted is actually inspired by true events but that appears to be true.

Tom Brown Jr. was an avid outdoorsman and tracker who wrote many books about wilderness survival and his adventures. In one of them, Case Files Of The Tracker, he talks about the mission where he had to hunt down one of his former pupils who happened to be a Special Forces sergeant. Whether all of this really happened is not that much important. The story here is just a placeholder for all the action, running, and fighting. Mostly running to be completely honest. On that note, The Hunted is the third, unofficial sequel of the eighties classic The Fugitive. In that movie, Tommy Lee Jones was looking for Harrison Ford and in the 1998 U.S. Marshals, he was chasing Wesley Snipes.

Here, he plays a very similar character only without his trusty team. His opponent, a highly skilled black ops soldier Aaron Hallam is played by Benicio Del Toro. So, a classic game of cat and mouse is about to begin between these two. We also have the FBI agent Abby Durrell, played by Connie Nielsen, also trying to bring Del Toro. Since these are the early 2000s, the story starts in the Balkans, where else? We’ve got the classic background story of a soldier haunted by memories of war and its atrocities. This opening segment was quite convincing and looked authentic despite its generic nature.

This was just a sign of more almost unintentionally funny machismo stereotypes we’ll run into later on. Like when Tommy Lee takes off his jacket and goes into the woods without any equipment or provisions to look for Del Toro. To top it off, he says that if he’s not back in two days to not look for him. And I’m not even going to talk about the whole knife-making thing although I’ll admit that knife combat was superb. The Hunted features a knife fighting technique Sayoc Kali, a modification of the Eskrima, a much broader martial art focusing on close-range combat with weapons. These parts of the movie were excellent, especially when compared to the above-mentioned shenanigans.

Luckily, the running time is short and the pacing is fast. This makes the contrived plot and occasionally cheesy scenes go down a lot smoother. Especially if you’re looking for that “genuine B movie experience”. You know, drink a few beers, smoke a few joints, and relax experience. Granted, The Hunted is technically somewhere in between but we sure as shit know its spirit is wholeheartedly fun eighties/nineties B action movie. All it’s missing is Michael Dudikoff. After all, we also have the whole “retired pro is called back for one last mission thing”.

One of the things those movies did so well was use the striking locations, basically free sets, to spice up things. Here, things are no different and our chase will lead us to not just remote forests and mountains but also urban jungles. I was half-expecting them to throw in a short excursion to Latin America but I guess we weren’t that lucky. In case you’re wondering where was The Hunted filmed, it was mostly in Oregon. The scenes featuring the Columbia River Gorge were especially stunning. Mount Hood is the place with all the snow and those beautiful mountain tops. I knew Oregon was gorgeous but these places were on another level.