THE HUNTED
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: One of the ten worst movies ever made. Christopher Lambert vs. evil ninjas in modern-day Japan... and nobody wins.
THE HUNTED is such a bad movie, so completely inept and so totally brain-damaged that I could almost feel affection for it. I could see myself showing this movie to friends and getting a good jolly guffaw out of it, if it weren't also insanely xenophobic and insulting.
Christopher Lambert plays a computer-parts salesman who's on business in Japan. He meets a slinky young woman (Joan Chen) and has a torrid night of lovemaking with her -- and then manages to witness her death at the hands of an evil ninja clan and their leader (John Lone). Apparently they had some unfinished business that could only be concluded with her getting slaughtered. Since Lambert is a witness, he's of course the next one to die.
Let's stop and think about this for a second. If Lambert were in real life being chased by fanatical devotees to a ninja secret society, he'd have a lifespan you could only measure with an atomic clock. In this movie, the ninja manage to kill just about everyone EXCEPT him. I imagine the Japanese gods smiled down on Lambert and provided him with a Goof Field that radiates out about ten feet from his body. You know what a Goof Field is: that invisible zone in which anyone who has intent to do harm to you becomes a klutz no matter what their real dexterity is.
This is, of course, only the beginning of the movie's problems. Lambert eventually finds pseudo-safety with a long-haired modern-day samurai (Yoshio Harada) and his partner -- Yoko Shimada, who you may remember as Lady Toda Buntaro in SHOGUN. They are the two best things in the movie; in every scene they have authority and presence, and they actually look like they belong here, even when dressed in full samurai armor and wielding bows. The script doesn't know what the hell to do with them.
Lone, as the bad guy, is zero-dimensional. The only bad-guy cliche he has to wallow around in is the one about how the bad guy always has exotic women dripping off of him. In THE HUNTED, this is elevated to the level of an insulting stereotype. What's funny is that the peripheral characters in THE HUNTED are not sterotypes -- there's a nice little scene with a Tokyo cabdriver, and a girl in a pachinko parlor -- but many of the main characters are unsalveageably hateful. Also, the phenomenal instrumental troupe Kodo has assembled a superior soundtrack -- get the CD -- that manages to survive despite the drek it's been designed to accompany.
There is an extended battle scene in the middle of the movie that is almost reason enough to watch the whole thing -- a gory, excellently staged fight on the bullet train that shows some real imagination for a moment, and then smothers it by trying to clumsily re-couple the whole thing with the movie's relentlessly stupid plot. By the time we get to the final showdown, with Lambert getting to wield his own sword (which, judging from the ham-handed editing of one scene, was forged in seven hours or so), we no longer care. We're not even given any definitive information about whether or not one of the key characters lives or dies!
Someone once said that the key to good art -- good movies, good books, whatever -- is to start somewhere interesting, end up somewhere interesting, and show respect for the audience all along the way. This movie bungles two out of three, badly.
Zero out of four unsharpened throwing stars.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device...
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