Rating: 
Summary: Histrionic Tour De Force
Review: "Actions speaking louder than words" is the benchmark of what Alfred Hitchcock would label pure cinema. THE HUNTED is a dramatic tour de force of pure cinema. Tommy Lee Jones as the "hunter" and Benicio Del Toro as the "hunted" are perfectly cast and deliver frightenedly realistic performances. William Friedkin's direction disposes any hint of a smooth narrative flow. Instead Friedkin relies on the strengths of his two leads to interpret the strange camaraderie that exists between the man who teaches to kill and the man who will not stop killing. The teacher and the viewer know that there is only one way to stop the pupil. The opening of the film suggests that Del Toro has become traumatized by the inhumanity he witnesses in Kosovo and an extermination we see him carry out in that war zone. Now Del Toro has started killing hunters in the northwest forests and Jones must reluctantly agree to stop him. I really liked Del Toro's performance because he does not seem to be a man traumatized by bloodshed but instead needs a purpose to continue practicing the skills that he is so ever proficient at. I equally liked Tommy Lee Jones' performance because he instinctively knows of this primal need that Del Toro must satisfy. The minimal plot and other characters in this film are only synergist elements to set the stage for Jones and Del Toro. Strangely the viewer identifies with Del Toro's character because we only see him kill those that extinguish life. They take life without really questioning the overall purpose of the system of right and wrong that has been created here on earth. Jones too is an instrument to that end which we can not truly fathom.
Rating: 
Summary: Sweaty, bloody, taut and rawhide tough.
Review: The words of singer Johnny Cash grace the opening and closing credits of "The Hunted;" the movie fails to draw much of a connection to them, but the Man In Black would appreciate William Friedkin's blood-n-sweat thriller, which plays like an hot afternoon of whiskey shots and unfiltered cigarettes. After an unnecessarily brutal opening sequence set amidst the ethnic cleansing of the war in Kosovo, "The Hunted" settles into the meat of its bare bones, so to speak -- a man-on-man struggle of fists, knives and wills between a deranged special forces vet (Benecio Del Toro) and the civilian teacher who trained him for combat. (Tommy Lee Jones).Del Toro is Aaron Hallam, whose trauma experienced during an assassination raid in Kosovo -- he keeps seeing the girl standing above a mass grave of her family -- has embedded his battle stress so deep that on missions, says his superior, "you can't distinguish the deputies from the sheriffs." Hallam is AWOL by the time the movie hits present day, and he's taken to the Oregon pine forests, where he carries out his own sniper missions on unsuspecting deer hunters. A second set of murders pits tracker/survivalist L.T. Bonham (Jones) against his former student. Age difference aside, it's a level fight.
The strength of "The Hunted" is in its limitations -- Friedkin does not harness an unwanted love angle onto the story, nor does he digress into messy subplots. The knife fights -- Bonham and Hallam use handmade blades -- are surprisingly swift and intense; Friedkin wisely includes a scene to explain military knife techniques that informs the final confrontation. Del Toro dials down his tics to make a sufficiently creepy -- and quiet -- killing machine. Hallam is beyond words or hope; his explanation for murders is a treatise on chicken farms. Bizarre, but Del Toro lends it weight. For his part, Jones is in painfully familiar "go get him!" territory, but he manages to put a few shades in the jittery Bonham, who equally loathes heights, questions, guns and anything that isn't outdoors. Jones is particularly good in a scene where Bonham admits to an FBI agent (Connie Nielsen, reliably tough in a thankless role) that Hallam would be his first kill. A directorial giant in the 1970s with "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist," Friedkin has forged a nice second career out of crafting alpha-male pulp. He still can direct a chase -- although "The Hunted" plies its trade on foot instead of cars -- and the Oregon photography by Caleb Deschanel looks like a lush, wet blanket. There is a serious dose of violence in "The Hunted," but it doesn't cheat -- fighting hasn't looked so painful and exhausting in some time. Movie action is often ludicrous; I perked up when "The Hunted" endeavored to present the real thing. A few notches below the like-minded "First Blood" and "The Fugitive," but it has throwback moxie.
Rating:
Summary: The Hunted-Pointless and Confusing
Review: The Hunted, an inert and bizarre thriller from director William Friedkin who use to direct and appreciate good movies. Tommy Lee Jones and Benecio Del Toro star in this incredibly senseless film, I only gave it three stars for the great action.
The film unfortunate to say is not very suspenseful, it's rather banal and unsurprising.
Basically, Jones, plays a commander of an elite special forces unit which use brutal tactics involving knifes and other such weapons. Toro is a lead student in his class and is commended for his great work. Soon during a secretive mission in Kosovo, he after completeing the missions successfully he loses his mind and essentially goes mad. He targets deer hunters whom he thinks are CIA agents trying to nail him. He's very surreptitious and cautious and so no one can catch me or so he thought. Soon the cat and mouse games becomes an intense deadly and fairly gruesome knife game which could be depicted from many horror films.
Toro is an expert when it comes to being a killing machine. Jones's primary objective is to catch him and of course execute him. An excellent knife fight is staged pretty much at the end of the film between Toro and Jones. All in all, the $6 used for the film ticket would've been better for charity. I mean that film wasn't atrocious, but it wasn't an amazing film. Personally
I think Tommy Lee Jones, is desperate for money, and so is Friedkin and Toro. This film should've immediately come to tape,
but it's a bit late for that. The only thing I can recommend about this film is the enthralling action, but one must have the stomach for the gory and graphic knife fights.
The Hunted is rated R for Strong Bloody Violence (which is indeed true) and Some Language. The violence is excessive but is considerable. I would recommennd only to fans of action and possibly fans who admire stupidity, cause that's all you'll get from this movie. See if you must, you should probably see it right away though.
Rating:
Summary: not very memorable
Review: Directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist) and starring Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive) and Benicio Del Toro (Traffic), I had fairly high expectations going into this movie. While I did not expect a classic to hold up over 25 years, I did expect a well crafted piece of filmmaking. I got half of what I expected. The basic story opens with Del Toro working a special operation in Kosovo. He is a soldier trained to get in and out quietly and kill his target. He is one of the unit's best. We see the horror that Del Toro experiences begin to affect him, and the nightmares that he is having. We can see that he was once an American soldier but is now a victim of battle stress. Tommy Lee Jones plays the man who trained Del Toro. Del Toro is back stateside and we next see him hunting men who are out hunting. Jones is called in to help with the case and when he discovers that it is his former student, the film begins with a game of cat and mouse between student and teacher. The movie had the potential to be a classic action film. Somewhere along the line, the concept of plot was left out. Del Toro has battle fatigue and is now targeting civilians in his own country. Why? Calling it battle fatigue and starting to give Del Toro an environmental motivation (the people he killed didn't have any respect for nature, Del Toro tells Jones) starts to lose the focus of the movie. There is dramatic tension, but the movie begins to feel empty. Neither Del Toro or Jones are developed as characters. They are who they are and they are exactly the way they are without any change or explanation. That is sloppy filmmaking. The action/fight sequences are well done, even with Tommy Lee Jones as one of the fighters. Well done action, well done chase sequences. And yet something was missing in the movie to really make it good. In the end, I enjoyed watching the movie but it was very forgettable. The one thing that surprised me was the violence was fairly graphic and intense with a little bit of gore going on. If you are squeamish about blood or violence, this movie might bother you.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining
Review: This movie didn't go through very well with critics but you have to take to time to just pay attention to it. I thought it was a great action film but for a movie like this I would expect it to be around 2 hours so that's why I knocked it down a star.. Benecio del Toro plays Aaron, a former special forces killing machine who has finally snapped. He lives out in the woods and is either so far gone that he believes deer hunters are really CIA agents sent to kill him or he is so far gone that he just kills anyone who crosses his path, especially if they hurt animals. Tommy Lee Jones plays L.T., a survival expert who trained Aaron and hundreds of other soldiers. He, too, seems to like animals more than people. We see him tenderly rescue a beautiful white huskie from a snare and then slam the head of the guy who set it against a table.<...
Rating: 
Summary: What was this movie about????
Review: If you believe that Tommy Lee Jones can smell Benico Del Toro behind a bus in a crowded city, OR that Benico Del Toro can fashion a military knife out of a piece of steel found in a junk yard in the same two minutes that Tommy Lee Jones makes an identicle one out of a rock, OR that Benicio Del Toro can set a complex trap in a city park made of two heavy logs with spikes in a couple of minutes and that Tommy Lee Jones would find the microscopic trip wire hidden in the leaves..., then you will love this movie. Oh, I forgot to mention that you will have to like movies with no plot, no character development and no explaination of what the hell is going on. Other than that, this was great.
Rating: 
Summary: read Tom Brown Jr.'s books instead!
Review: I have attended Tom Brown Jr.'s classes and workshops. This movie has very little to do with the life of Tom Brown. Tommy Lee Jones' character is based on one facet of Brown's life as a tracker/consultant to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. I am sure Brown has had to track cunning criminals over the years, but that is where the similarity to Brown ends. The film does showcase some of the Apache Native American survival and tracking skills that were handed down by Grandfather to Brown. It is viewing these that gives the movie its only redeeming quality. The survival knife that is featured prominently as a separate character was designed by Brown and used as an extension of himself. That it has been reduced from a sacred tool to a cold blooded hacking and butchering weapon brought Brown to tears at one of the workshops I attended. Working as a consultant to the film, he had no idea that William Friedkin would pervert everything that Brown represented for selfish Hollywood purposes. As cinematic art, this film has to be one of the worst movies ever made. There is almost no plot, no dialogue, no character development. The killing is completely senseless and butts directly against the reverence for life and spiritual aspects of survival living that Tom Brown teaches on an equal footing with the skills. The urban and natural camouflage scenes that Brown no doubt orchestrated are a treat; but on the flip side, they had to be toned down so that Del Toro is not completely invisible to the camera, as would have been the case with an actual Apache scout. Additionally, the timing of events is totally out of whack, which makes the movie even more difficult to sympathise with. It takes away from the thrill to realize that a scout in the wild could smith Brown's knife with nothing but a rusty leaf spring, if this scout is at the same time hypothermic, injured, exhausted, and simultaneously has set up a crushing bear trap, spun a 100 foot rope, set a snare to dangle Jones over a waterfall, and then is in two places at once. Each single event, which to the uninitiated is inconceivable in itself, becomes completely unbelievable when they all occur within the time frame of only an afternoon. Which is too bad, because the amazing thing is that Tom Brown, Grandfather, and the Apache scouts could actually do these things. Read Tom Brown Jr's books to find out how.
Rating:
Summary: Next please!
Review: My review? Its this: Yesterday I saw this movie. Five minutes after it was over, I wasn't thinking about it. Today, I can barely remember it. I saw the Godfather a week ago. I can take an SAT test on it. Don't listen to any blurbs on the tv ads praising it. They've been paid for. Just read (sigh) Roger Ebert's review. It reads like a grade school paper written during journal time. As if he has contempt for his readers, and the filmmakers who gave him the cash as well. Who's he to thumb his nose? A bad movie. A bad time for making them in general.
Rating:
Summary: The Teacher vs. The Student
Review: In "The Hunted", an FBI Special Agent, who goes by the initials "L.T." (Tommy Lee Jones), trains many prospective students - one of which turns out to be an actual prodigy. Allan Hallam (Benecio Del Toro) learns all the tricks of the trade, taught by L.T. himself. Earlier, L.T. survives during a mission in Kosovo and befriends Hallam during a bloody regime there. Now, L.T. must stop this psychotic sociopath from spreading his spree of mysterious killings all over the Oregon wilderness. Just when L.T. and the rest of the FBI have this man in their sights, Hallam miraculously escapes death by seconds each time the Feds catch up to him, managing to pull off Houdini-like escapeapades in the process. "The Hunted"'s plot is neither to deep nor too shallow - yet this movie contains enough hooks to grab the average viewer's attenion, making "The Hunted" a good, although not a great picture. Another reason this movie is worthy of viewing, is because it contains few pitfalls, with the only few appearing in the film's opening minutes. Another thing: It's too bad the main antagonist's diabolical skills include only making little dimpy pocket knives, because if that's all the FBI is training our nation's (future) intelligensia to do, then the citizens of the United States are in deep, deep trouble! All kidding aside, this is one instance where one will not mind being "the hunted" instead of "the hunter" for a change. Your "target" is marked at your local theater. Take aim today, because with a near-diabolical plot this huge, it's impossible to miss!
Rating:
Summary: Predictable and Underdeveloped
Review: This movie was both extremely predictable, the ending was known within the first 30 minutes of the movie. With that said, it was a pain to have to sit through the movie with a known ending. The movie seemed too long, but did not develop any of the critical plot points. If you feel a need to see this movie, please wait to rent for it is not worth the money spent in the theatre.
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