Film / The Hunted (2003)

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The Hunted is a 2003 action thriller film directed by William Friedkin, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro.

In the green woods of Silver Falls, Oregon, Aaron Hallam (del Toro), a trained assassin AWOL from the Special Forces, keeps his own brand of wildlife vigil. After Hallam brutally slays four deer hunters in the area, FBI Special Agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen) turns to L.T. Bonham (Jones) as the one man who may be able to stop him.

At first Bonham resists the mission. Snug in retirement, he's closed off to his past spent training soldiers to become skilled murderers. But when he realizes that these recent slaying is the work of a man he trained, he feels obligated to stop him. Accepting the assignment under the condition that he works alone, Bonham enters the woods, unarmed—plagued by memories of his best student and riddled with guilt for not responding to Hallam's tortured letters to him as he began to slip over the edge of sanity. Furious as he is with his former mentor for ignoring his pleas for help, Hallam knows that he and Bonham share a tragic bond that is unbreakable. And, even as they go into their final combat against each other, neither can say with certainty who is the hunted and who is the hunter.

Not to be confused with the 1995 movie of the same name.

The Hunted contains examples of:

• A Father to His Men: Played with. Those trained by L.T. do see him as a father figure. He does return the feeling (having kept all of Hallam's letters to him speaking of his difficulties) but finds himself failing the "Father's Dilemma": how to tell your child "I don't know the answer".
• Affably Evil: Hallam has sunk deep into despair and in the midst of a trauma-triggered killing spree. However, he's still affable and charming and desperate for a civil conversation with someone who's willing to take the time to talk him down.
• Alas, Poor Villain: It's hard not to pity Hallam when he finally dies. One can't help but wonder if he'd have been different if Bonham had listened to him, or whether he was actually right that the hunters he killed were assassins sent after him.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whether the hunters that Hallam killed really were assassins out to get out him. On the one hand, they are never referred by any of the various factions trying to capture Hallam, when a simple line could have confirmed their identity. On the other hand they seem noticeably unsurprised and not afraid when Hallam starts talking to them and all but announces his intentions. If they were just hunters, you'd think things like an unseen, unhinged sounding man suddenly talking to them out in the middle of the woods and throwing a knife near them would get a much bigger and different reaction than it does.
• Artistic License – Physics: You can't get steel red hot by sticking it in a campfire. To forge steel you need a, well, forge. The training montage actually shows one.
• Attack Its Weak Point: A rock knife has a distinctive weak point, it's brittle and prone to break at the handle. Something Hallam takes advantage of in his fight with Bonham.
• Beard of Sorrow: L.T. has a scruffy grey beard as a visual symbol of his isolation from civilization.
• Bittersweet Ending: Hallam is killed by Bonham, a man he greatly respected, without every having found the peace or answers he was looking for. Bonham is forced to kill Hallam, a man he essentially created, without being able to provide the meaningful help Hallam desperately needed. However, Hallam is no longer haunted by his demons and Bonham is shown at the end seemingly ready to process his experiences and settle back into his quiet life in seclusion.
• Bookends: A stanza of "Highway 61 Revisited" is narrated by Johnny Cash at the beginning and at the end of the movie.
  God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son".👁 Image
  
• Chekhov's Gun: There are extended sequences where Bonham teaches Hallam how to forge and knap knives. Just before the climactic fight, Hallam forges a steel knife and Bonham cooperates by chipping out a flint one at the same time in preparation for the duel.
• Chekhov's Skill: Bonham taught Hallam to track and kill, and both of them put their skills to good use throughout the film.
• Cold Ham: Hallam hardly raises his voice but expresses great anguish and rage through intense stares and the clinical way in which he dispenses violence.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Hallam served with Delta Force, but during a training flash back to L. T.'s class, ALL US elites (Rangers, SEALS, Green Berets, and Marines) show up.
• A Handful for an Eye: Hallam uses his own blood to temporarily blind L.T.
• He Knows Too Much: It is implied that the government is after Hallam because he's cracking and has become a threat to national security.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Hallam. He just can't readjust to civilian life after the horrible things he's seen, even though he'd really like to settle down with his girlfriend.
• If I Do Not Return: When Bonham goes to follow Hallam's track, he says if he's not back in fifteen minutes, he's dead.
• Ineffectual Loner: Bonham. He's a retired recluse at the beginning of the movie.
• Knife Fight: The final duel between L.T. and Hallam is a particularly bloody knife fight.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Before their climactic showdown L.T. and Hallam are shown taking the time to make knives out of the materials they can find.
• A Master Makes Their Own Tools: An early flashback shows that part of the survivalist Special Forces training that Bonham taught Hallam and other soldiers is the forging, chiseling, and construction of their personal knives. This gets revisited near the end, when the two scavenge materials in the wilderness to build new weapons for their final duel to the death. It also provides some Weapon-Based Characterization that shows where their "mastery" has taken them: Hallam's fire-forged scrap metal knife symbolizes his traumatic descent into a Sociopathic Soldier, while Bonham's fashioning of a rock into a blade shows his connection to nature as an Old Master.
• Meaningful Echo: The same "Highway 61 Revisited" stanza referenced in Bookends.
• Noodle Incident: Played straight. When Hallam is taken into custody and the police try to question him, he says there are things he wants to talk about, and starts naming all the covert/black ops he'd been sent on by codename. Bonham storms into the room to stop him, asking Hallam if he's trying to get himself killed.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Durrell appeared disappointed that Bonham manages to kill Hallam first before they could arrest him after having killed her close colleagues and she didn't get to avenge them herself.
• Private Military Contractor: L.T. wasn't actually in the military, because his father didn't want his son going through the same horrors he had and pulled every string possible to prevent L.T. from serving. L.T. ended up training soldiers how to kill as a contractor, though.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Zig-Zagging Trope.
  • To quote Roger Ebert's review👁 Image
    :
    We've seen so many fancy high-tech computer-assisted fight scenes in recent movies that we assume the fighters can fly. They live in a world of gravity-free speed-up. Not so Friedkin's characters. Their fight is gravity-based. Their arms and legs are heavy. Their blows land solidly, with pain on both sides. They gasp and grunt with effort. They can be awkward and desperate. They both know the techniques of hand-to-hand combat, but in real life, it isn't scripted, and you know what? It isn't so easy. We are involved in the immediate, exhausting, draining physical work of fighting.
  • On the other hand Tom Brown, Jr., the primary consultant👁 Image
    on the film is a bit ashamed of it despite this.
    ...the bloody knife fight at the end — no way it would last 4 minutes, any of those wounds are lethal.
  • On a similar note to the above, martial artists breaking down the scene have pointed out that while they approve of it overall, there are multiple occasions where the characters are making attacks that go against normal tactics, passing up open chances to finish or critically wound their opponent, or using attempts at defense that could be easily countered or circumvented but aren't. (See here👁 Image
    ) One could chalk that up to characters making less than perfect decisions in the heat of the moment while they're in pain, they have adrenaline pumping, etc., but it seems more likely that it was done to look fancy, impressive, or more dramatic.
• Retired Badass: L.T. has long since stopped training soldiers by the time the film begins. Naturally, Hallam's rampage forces him out of retirement.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: Both Hallam and Bonham. Hallam is stealthy enough to kill two armed men before they even see him coming, and Bonham is more skilled than that.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Both leads. Hallam is scarred from his years of in-your-face kills, Bonham is scarred from his years of teaching soldiers to make in-your-face kills.
• That Didn't Happen: Hallam's work. Lampshaded by Dale Hewitt, an SFOD-D agent when he tells Van Zandt that for all intents and purposes, Hallam doesn't exist.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The take-down method L.T. teaches in the below-mentioned training montage involves: a slash to the brachial artery, a slash to the throat, a stab to the heart, a slash to each femoral artery, followed by a stab to the lung, just to make absolutely sure the guy is dead. They drill this so it becomes as natural as zipping up after using the bathroom.
  "Arm, throat, heart, leg, leg, arm, lung."
• Too Dumb to Live: Dale Hewitt, the Smug Snake leader of the group of soldiers sent to take care of Hallam, all get a bit too comfortable around him. When Dale moves to poison Hallam, he just overpowers and kills everyone
  Hallam: Is it painless Dale?
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Durrell, following the deaths of her friends she becomes emotionally compromised and started clearly acting irrationally which caused her to be fanatically blinded in an emotionally compromised state by It's Personal Revenge Before Reason, believing she's The Only One Allowed to Defeat You in regards to Hallam, becomes unreasonable towards Bonham to a point she gives out a Shut Up, Kirk! to him when he tries to warn her Hallam will kill more of her men if she goes all out, implicitly blaming Bonham for creating a monster like Hallam and finally even after Bonham manages to defeat and kill Hallam to prevent more bloodshed, she's more angered that she was cheated out of avenging her comrades over the fact Hallam is finally dead nonetheless, acted as an Ungrateful Bitch towards Bonham and it's possible the two irreconcilably parted on bad terms after the man hunt was over.
• Training Montage: The flashback that details the origins and relationship between L.T. and Hallam.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Rather than showing gratitude towards Bonham for killing Hallam, Durrell appears to be seething angered by the fact she did not get to avenge her colleagues' deaths due to Bonham beating her to it.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The details are fictional, but the central premise — a soldier who cracked and needed to be tracked down by the expert who trained him — was confirmed by Tom Brown, Jr., the film's consultant.
  "The story line is fabricated, but parts happened in my life. A guy I trained went bad and I had to track him down and that is the toughest because when you are tracking someone who knows your skills you start playing a deadly chess game."
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • L.T.'s final weapon is a stone knife he makes using ancient knapping techniques. Although deadly, it's brittle and easily broken, reflecting L.T.'s portrayal as a skilled fighter who is, nevertheless, slowed by age and conflicted about having to kill a former student.
  • Hallam finds scrap metal and forges a tracker knife meant for instinctual chopping and slashing. He is a broken man who is running on pure survival instinct, ready to lash out on muscle memory alone with no real objective other than to live a little longer.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Hallam delivers one to L.T. through implication, saying that he wrote letters but never received a response. L.T. clearly holds great guilt over receiving requests for help but not being able to. Never having served in combat, he just didn't have the knowledge or skills to reply in a meaningful manner.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: L.T. suffers motion sickness and is afraid of heights. It does not hamper him in his pursuit of Hallam.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: The people sent to take care of Hallam led by Dale goes into a "The Reason You Suck" Speech instead of just killing him outright with the poison he was going to use.