The Hunted

After several professional hunters are found savagely murdered in the forests of Oregon, FBI agent Abby Durrell asks former agent L.T. Bonham for assistance. Before Bonham retired, he worked in the Special Forces training soldiers to kill and survive. That part of his life is a closed chapter, or so he thinks, until he discovers that it is one of his pupils, the elite soldier Aaron Hallam, who has run amok.

Now the hunt for Hallam is on, and it ends in a showdown between pupil and master, a fight to the death. Only raw instinct remains, and only the strongest survives.

The Hunted is an unresolved mix of the first Rambo film "First Blood" and "The Fugitive". Tommy Lee Jones is once again the hunter, but the dramatic problem is that the hunted man, unlike Harrison Ford's character in "The Fugitive", has actually committed murder.

The film is exciting, but it promises more than it delivers. Along the way the film builds up to a conspiracy-theory plot, but it quietly peters out. Benicio del Toro is good as the traumatised elite soldier who cannot stop killing. The question, then, is whether his victims were out to kill him, and whether it was in fact self-defence. That immediately gives the story a quite different twist, but we get more questions than answers, with the result that the film feels unfinished.