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Review

This repellent piece of exploitation does nothing to mute the argument that French Connection director Friedkin is permitted to periodically churn out slickly produced but intellectually vacuous action flicks like The Hunted only because he's married to the studio chief. An echo of The Fugitive and First Blood, Jones stars as a retired Special Forces instructor sought out by the FBI to help track down and kill one of his own trainees (Del Toro), a live-wire who's blown a head gasket from cumulative battle stress and taken to slaughtering deer hunters in the Pacific Northwest. Exquisitely photographed by Caleb Deschanel and crisply edited, the production is sleek and the pace is relentless but, like most of Friedkin's actioners, its brawny machismo and grisly violence are revolting. An obtuse bookend quote about Abraham sacrificing a son feebly attempts to infuse the movie with some Biblical subtext, but really it's all about the eventual bloody showdown between two knife-wielding, scowl-wearing men — shamelessly recycled from scoops of previous genre classics, yet handsomely executed. So to speak.

 -- Steven D. Segal