Few years ago Get Out was just about universally proclaimed to be the latest word on social satire in horror comedy genre. It wasn’t. It was terribly one sided and nowhere near as clever as it thought itself to be. Jordan Peele has since redeemed himself with his follow up Us, which was, in fact, almost as clever as it thought itself to be and featured phenomenal Oscarworthy acting turn by Lupita Nyong'o. Us didn’t gather the same accolades, either because by then Peele has already busted his bubble or because it was indeed too clever and nuanced for general public as opposed to the dumbed down every yell Get Out at the screen movie.
But now the movie came along that is indeed a perfect horror comedy social satire and it is indeed the latest word on the Pacific Ocean sized left/right divide in the US. The name of this movie is The Hunt. It has been dreamed up by the mad geniuses Cuse and Lindelof, the team behind Lost, (the latest) Watchmen and more. This is a movie that can be simply described as liberals hunting conservatives in a sort of PC version of hunger games for adults and it would still be fun tom watch it at that, just on a purely superficial level, without thinking twice about any of the plot’s more complex implications. I wouldn’t recommend that, because I don’t believe in dumb entertainment and I believe people are doing themselves a disservice by selecting things that will actively not engage or straight up disengage their minds. But of course, any major network’s or Netflix line up will prove me wrong. Dumb is very in these days. So let me tell you how smart this movie is, how cleverly it takes on every ugly stereotype from both sides of the sociopolitical divide and plays it up. Fair warning…in telling you these things I will absolutely be discussing all the major plot turns, so if you like surprises, I suggest you quit reading this review, go watch the movie, then come back and see if you agree with me. Ok, you’ve been warned, let’s continue…America is red and blue, there’s white there too, but that sounds too much like a race conversation and this movie actually isn’t about race, refreshingly so. This is about class, that thing no one in America really talks about and which exists anyway, because it isn’t a fairy and its existence isn’t contingent on your belief in it. On one side, the extreme left, you have wealthy educated (coastal) politically correct elites, on the other…there are the denim clad, mulleted, ignorant racist homophobic dumb news conspiracy prone hoi polloi. The latter are usually the ones with all the guns, but what if they tables were turned and the elites, despite their gun control principles, took up the arms and went on a slaughter spree in the name of…good taste and population control and maybe, just maybe, just a hint of personal vendetta? Well, then you’d have The Hunt. A bunch of strangers wake up in the middle of nowhere, gagged. As soon as they are given the means to defend themselves, the gunfire starts. Not just gunfire either. There’s a number of creatively gory deaths right to begin with, including the two blandly pretty victims disposed of right away. Their faces are recognizable, one’s a scream queen, one’s a tv actor from a popular show. The rest are mostly a bunch of nobodies and nobody adjacents, with a notable exception of Amy Madigan and her fascinating wrinklage. Because, because, because this is a Betty Gilpin show through and through. And she does an awesome star making job here. Gilpin is an interesting actress. She’s built like a Barbie doll and named like a Golden Girl. Her real name is actually Elizabeth Folan Gilpin and there’s a number of different versions of that you can come up with and not make it sound like a cute old lady, but she must know what she’s doing and in the end it shouldn’t matter anyway, because she’s good, people, she’s genuinely good. Mostly known to the world as Liberty Bell, the woman who thoroughly and consistently steals the show from Alison Brie in Glow, Gilpin is the American version of Toni Collette, an offbeatly attractive, wildly talented and versatile actress. Her Barbie doll proportions are actually kind of insane, unignorable even in the grimy workman get up she wears in the movie. But she also can kick serious ass, although stunt doubles surely did most of the work, she’s still blatantly in a number of scenes. And she’s got a terrific comedic timing. That quality of stillness punctuated by minute expressions that convey plenty. She does that. Her opponent is Swank, a formidable force, who finally landed a juicy role, possibly to make up for the embarrassment of Fatale. Their final showdown is pure cinematic action magic. It’s brutal and hilarious in all the right ways. But before they get there…there’s all the political commentary to weed through. The right are stupid, the left are insane. Both spend too much time on social media. Both get hoisted by their own petards, the liberals by their own rampant political correctness (Swank’s character Athena gets fired for one text referring to the conservatives as deplorables, which is really, really not that terrible in the grand scheme of things), the conservatives get trapped in the very conspiracy theory of Manorgate they’ve created and been wrongly feeding fire this entire time. The reason Gilpin’s Crystal gets out at all (and no, not because everyone screamed Get Out) is because she’s actually an innocent who gets dragged into this mess because white trash loves the name Crystal so much, there are two of them in her hometown. So this Crystal is a mixed bag of things, she’s got a white trash accent and appearance, but she’s also army tough, willing to help and has (to Athena’s endless surprise) read a book in her life. And, of course, she’s a fine tuned killing machine. Booya. The main thing is Crystal is a kind of person that it’s easy to make assumptions about and, unlike the rest of the cast, who live up to every single assumption you can make about them, she turns out to be considerably more nuanced. Enough to bring the entire thing down. Is that the message here? Has the entire country gone mad with making assumptions about each other and forgotten how to get along? No, that would be entirely too reductive. But there’s something there, no? The interesting thing about it is that the blue color/no color character definitely triumphs over the white color liberals. In a movie written by Lalaland’s liberals. It’s a movie that makes fun of both sides of the spectrum so aggressively that it can probably be interpreted easily enough in favor of the either side. The main thing spoofed, though, of course, is the insane divide itself. The fact that such different mentalities, attitudes, lives can exist in the same country. It explains a lot. And whatever side wins in the movie for you, in real life it’s pretty obvious who does. If it isn’t obvious, you should probably rewind and study in slow motion the American history of the last, say, 5 years. It’s the movie the deplorables probably would loathe without pausing to think it might actually take or at least understand their side, which is probably just another reason to see it. But either way, it’s also just pure fun. And funny. Ambitious, sure, it its intent and probably not quite hitting all the right notes, because the overall message comes out much too mixed. The ideal hero of the people, the one who’ll share the fancy food with the flight attendant and look just as good in a fancy dress is Crystal clearly the one who shall inherit this country. And she is far from meek. Did you expect something different from a country built on that much violence?
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