“The Hunting Party” stalks some recognizable territory, chasing after the thrills and black comic absurdity that come in the wake of war. Set in Bosnia-Herzegovina five years after the end of the conflict there, the entertaining muddle tries to be both whimsical and Seriously Important.
It blends up cool-guy bravado, a rock ’n’ roll sensibility, personality eccentricity and violence as it toggles between moments of gallows humor and tense action. But this fictionalized rendering, inspired by the wild misadventures of some of the real-life war correspondents in the spring of 2000, works only intermittently. Theirs was quite a story on its face, apparently, even without the over-heightening of it by writer-director Richard Shepard (“The Matador”).
Straining a little hard to seem offbeat here but remaining accessible, Richard Gere stars as disgraced, down-and-out TV journalist Simon Hunt.
Since an on-camera meltdown he had while covering the war in Bosnia, the madcap thrill seeker Simon had disappeared and lost contact with his buddy, former field cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard). Now comfortable and bored as lead cameraman for the network back home, Duck returns to Sarajevo to cover the end of the war anniversary and — thanks to a suddenly re-emerging Simon — ends up sucked back into the chaos and evil spun in that region by the Serbian ethnic cleansers.
Simon persuades Duck, along with a naïve young producer looking for credibility (Jesse Eisenberg), to join him on the trail of the fugitive war criminal known as “The Fox” (Ljubomir Kerekes). There’s a huge bounty to be earned with the capture of this most notorious leader of the genocide. And for reasons that we will eventually learn from brutal wartime flashbacks, Simon’s need to bring The Fox to justice is very personal. What unfolds is a paler version of an “Apocalypse Now”-like (i.e., “Heart of Darkness”-like) journey ever deeper into human immorality and international political corruption as the newsmen’s initially exhilarating road trip takes them ever closer to their prey. The United Nations, the CIA, and blind nationalism all turn out to be complicit in having allowed a mass-murder mastermind to remain free.
Meanwhile, Gere’s Simon remains the jolly, rascally sprite here until he finally faces his demon. The light-ish, satiric tone of so much of the piece makes it more palatable to watch, but also starts to feel insensitive in this milieu about the organized rape and attempted extermination of a whole people. It hardly feels like it ought to be a “Party.”
‘The Hunting Party’
***
Starring: Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg
Director: Richard Shepard
RatedR for strong language and some violent content
Running time: 103 minutes
