Review of The Hunting Party (2007) by Chads. — 02 Feb 2008

Once you go black, you can never go back; black, as in comedy, not...never mind. At the outset, "The Hunting Party" establishes Simon(Richard Gere) as the sort of narcissistic television journalist who covers wars for his own glory, rather than preserve the journalistic notion that the public has a right to know.

Simon is an adrenaline junkie; the near-death experience is his fix. He loves the spotlight; Duck(Terrence Howard), his cameraman, is a junkie, too, who gets high on whizzing bullets and the afterglow of Simon's fame.

The less we know about these men's personal lives, the better. "The Hunting Party" is a rollicking good time when the three C.I.A. poseurs(Benjamin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is like the virgin you see in teen sex-comedies who pops his cherry by the third reel) keep an emotional distance from the mayhem and heartbreak that ethnic cleansing creates, by cracking wise in a protective bubble of fearless obliviousness.

Clearly, this filmmaker wants to be a maverick like the late-Robert Altman, but "The Hunting Party" loses some of its verve and "M*A*S*H"-like spirit, in a scene that explains why Simon committed career suicide during a live feed from Bosnia.

This display of Simon's humanity doesn't derail "The Hunting Party"; the film quickly finds its footing with its precarious balancing act of absurdism and reflexiveness(pertaining to the action-movie genre), but it hurts the film's agenda, I think, to portray contemporary television journalists as being transparent and insincere fame-mongerers, who get into the reporting racket, solely, for the self-promotion and accolades it affords them.