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Overrated and overhyped

How sad is this?

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

A vile film. Directed with zero style, wit or class by Don Medford. Oliver Reed kidnaps schoolmarm Candice Bergen and finds himself and his band of motley outlaws pursued by Bergen's lunatic husband (Gene Hackman). Hackman, a real creep who is appalled at the notion that his wife will be defiled by Reed and returned to him, sadistically decides to track down the kidnappers and pick them off one-by-one. There is so little to recommend in this god-awful junk. Reed is nearly incomprehensible, Bergen makes a strange quaking face every time a man (including Hackman) touches her and Hackman gives one of his very rare one-note performances. He's campy rather than frightening. The supporting cast features some terrific character actors like JD Spradlin, LQ Jones and Simon Oakland, but none of them (with the possible exception of Oakland)brings any color to this dreck. Three people (including William Norton) worked on the script.

The movie contained an existential story, disguised as the story of a queen (Melissa) kidnapped by a charming thief (Frank, played by Oliver Reed), where the king (Brandt, played by Gene Hackman) following them to rescue the queen became a vile avenger, which in its turn was disguised as a story with guns and cowboy hats; but the chain of disguises became along the way somewhat sloppy. The fatalism underlying the whole construction seemed to be artificially created, it didn't follow from a narrative structure that couldn't have evolved differently. More precisely, Frank's unruly gang of gunfighters made every wrong choice possible. After realising that they were attacked, and by very long-range riffles, and by a relentless and merciless pursuer, the only thing they seemed to think of was to keep running forwards (and thus, to keep getting decimated). This attitude would have made sense had they all had Frank's audacity and slightly cynical stance; but they were just some robbers preparing for one last hit! Then, when they realist that the hunters were after Melissa, it was perfectly natural for the other robbers to try to get rid of her, and if Frank wanted to keep her at any cost, the natural course of action would have been for the others to leave Frank. This didn't happen either, everybody remained together, and they kept being decimated like dumb animals on a hunting ground. Sure that this was part of the point of interest – the special riffles made the hunters almost superhuman, and provided them with the impression of safety that surrounds the hunter in a normal hunting party; but like I said, this untouchability was created artificially, by having Frank's gang behave funny, culminating with the final idiotic decision for the gunless Frank and Melissa to go into the desert because Brandt would not follow them there. No, the man had the long-range riffle, and he had stuck with them all the way until then, chasing them into the ultimately open space which is the desert would certainly have been the last thing he would have done.This passivity of the gang of outlaws drove me mad – of course that the courses of action proposed by me could have resulted into an equal disaster, but they didn't even try! Not to mention that changing the way they tackled the problem may have made the story more interesting, like this it got a bit repetitive: slaughter, brief scene with Brandt grinding his teeth, Frank and Melissa in tears over dead friends (and outraged by the meanness of their pursuers, oh why didn't the bad guys just stop the chase already!), peaceful resumption of the journey, fun; slaughter, teeth grinding + tears, journey, fun...Like I said earlier, the story seemed to be an existential one, Brandt looked more like a Nemesis in charge of punishing those who dared to challenge the Order of Things (which was why he died in the end – after finishing the job, he had no more reason to exist), Frank and Melissa looked less like a fugitive couple and more like people touched by hubris, who thought they could take their destiny in their own hands (only to be proved wrong). But then what was the point of the stories about Frank's bad father and other such details? They should have been absent here, like they were absent in a movie like Walter Hill's "The Driver". If this was an archetypal story, then it should have stayed so from the beginning until the end (and it should have chosen a better environment for its tale, not an inexplicably resigned gang of brutish outlaws). However, now in retrospect I discover that various details that seemed pointless at first do make sense and reinforce the idea that Frank tried to mess with the Order of Things, like the very fact that Frank wanted to read – it was not his place to know how to read, like it had not been the place for humans to possess the fire given to them by Prometheus, these were devices of a higher order and those who dared to mess with them (both the wretched humans, and Prometheus respectively Melissa) had to pay dearly. Well, the more I think about the movie under this allegorical reading, the better it seems...Other things that bothered me about The Hunting Party were some random scenes of overacting (like the whole scene of Doc's death, where everybody seemed to have suddenly moved from the Western desert into a Shakespearean play on Broadway), mixed with moments of natural tenderness and human awkwardness (like the scene with the peaches, or like the love/rape scene between Melissa and Frank). The overacting felt out of place.So, read like an allegory, the movie seems to work much better than under a direct reading. This is still a sign of structural sloppiness, because with a different narrative underlayer the structure would have worked much better. I am also somewhat surprised that I appreciated the allegory, as I usually find them dull; I suppose that I am annoyed by transparent fables, those obviously meant to teach us something deep, while this was a very unexpected allegory, talking less about oughts and shouldn't-s and more about the local fate of some daredevil characters, who fitted surprisingly well over mythical figures and ancient plights.

I wonder if this film doesn't have pretensions to art. Maybe not, but it's evident that someone went to the trouble of thinking up some novel variations on the usual conventions.We've seen a number of movies before -- the posse or the revenge party pursuing somebody across harsh terrain -- "Tell Them Willie Boy is Here," "Three Godfathers", "Chato's Land," and so on -- but this is the only one I can think of offhand in which each party -- pursued and pursuer -- changes its attitude towards the other.About two dozen cowboy roughnecks led by Oliver Reed and including the bad L. Q. Jones and the good Mitchell Ryan kidnap the bride of the wealthy Western entrepreneur and big game hunter, Gene Hackman. Hackman hears about this while on a train, after banging a Chinese hooker, and, man, is he mad. He fantasizes the gang will rape Bergan repeatedly, impregnate her, and then sell her back as damaged goods. So he forms a posse of half a dozen friends, arms them with telescopic rifles that will outshoot any existing rifle by twice the range.Nothing much new there, except that instead of an outraged groom, Hackman has revealed himself as a stark materialist and a rather rough lover. But then Hackman's group gradually find themselves within range of the kidnappers after a long chase through some extremely picturesque mountains, badlands, and desert scrub. The kidnappers have no idea anything is up until a couple of them get shot by rifles too far away to see.Here's where somebody put some thought into the script. Ordinarily, in an ordinary Western, the convention is that when you are shot, you die. They may shoot your horse instead, but then the horse gets up with an irritated look and trots off unharmed. If you are only wounded, you get away and, if you're a good guy, you recover the use of your gun hand.Not here. A wound is intensely painful and your buddy can't always pluck out the offending bullet, no matter how much mescal you drink or how hard the praying Padre holds your arms down. If they're mortally wounded the victims just don't flop down and lie there. They twitch a little before they kick off. The horses don't get up if they're hit, although they're definitely horse de combat. (Apologies. The voices make me do it.) They jerk their heads and legs and whinny. The first kidnapper to get shot has his head blown off while taking a dump.Hackman treats all this as a hunting party. And one or two of his posse smile as they take pot shots, especially G. D. Spradlin. What they don't know is that Bergman has been scared out of her wits after the kidnapping but when she seeks comfort in the arms of the stolid Oliver Reed, he roughly rapes her. Then she falls in love with him. (I said it was artistically ambitious, not that it was politically correct.) The others in Hackman's party realize what's happening and leave. "It's not worth it," shouts Simon Oakland, the least likely cowboy you're ever likely to see, but he's right. Nevertheless, all the gang die except Reed who, along with Bergman, is reduced to trekking through the vastness of the desert, horseless, until they collapse. Their hopes in ruins, they murmur about plum trees and grapes in California, until the shimmering image of an equally horseless Hackman appears. He shoots both of them dead and collapses to wait for death.Hackman is always fine, either as bad guy or good guy. Oliver Reed, with his hoarse mutter and eternal scowl, is hard to place. Candace Bergen isn't given much opportunity to act. She looks (1) wary, (2) distressed, or under stress, as when being raped, (3) shocked and surprised. You can tell because her mouth opens and she screams, "Oh, oh, oh!" She's so staggeringly beautiful that it hardly matters. Her long loose blond hair is always immaculately brushed and lustrous. What would happen to your hair and mine under those circumstances does not happen to hers. As an actress, she labors under the same disadvantage as some other actresses -- like Kathleen Ross and Jane Fonda. She sounds like she just graduated from some classy school like Sarah Lawrence.There's a misplaced semi-comic incident involving canned peaches that the musical score, a sprightly banjo, tells us is supposed to be funny, but it's not.There may be an occasional wince while watching this but it's not a bad film. It's at least interesting all the way through.

A group of hired gunmen travelling north to participate in a range war (presumambly someplace like Kansas or Wyoming, as the story by all accounts seem to take place in the early 1880's) kidnap a hapless woman from a small town while her husband, a mean, sadistic sonofabitch cattle baron, is engaged in a hunting trip with his upper class buddies. Few people in any kind of audience, then or now, would have trouble spelling out this kind of plot in advance, how the woman will fall in love with her kidnapper while the husband realizes she's lost to him forever, but, seeing how this is a 44. Magnum, the most powerful handg- hey, waitaminute. Seeing how this is the pessimistic and violent movie world of the early 70's we're talking about, if it's going to be predictable, you can at least be sure it's going to be bloody and grim and nihilistic in the process.You know it's a grim movie you're going to see when it opens with a shot of Gene Hackman roughing up his wife a little in that particularly mean-spirited way that made him such an endearing villain in the early 70's (and which he reprised for Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN winning his second Oscar) intercut with shots of a cow being slaughtered. At least director Don Medford is upfront about it. The movie remains pretty unflinching in the portrayal of violence. Almost every actor is propped with blood squibs at some point in the film while others not lucky to be shot out of horses in slow motion get knives in their necks and buckshot in their faces. The Hunting Party is dinstictly a product of its time, a loyal retracing of the steps back to THE WILD BUNCH instead of taking the genre to new areas, belonging to that particularly bloody and violent American western niche that followed in the wake of Peckinpah's film (along with others like Chato's Land, The Revengers, The Deadly Trackers etc). Subverting and taking off the rose-tinted glasses the far west mythos was seen with by people like John Wayne, who cared so much about perceived values and ideals he had to make RIO BRAVO in response to Gary Cooper throwing down his star in HIGH NOON, taking a closer, more realistic look, if not at authentic period detail, then at least at how people were shot and killed.All blood and clamor aside however, The Hunting Party is just not a very good movie. Medford's average-to-poor direction and the fact it's 20 minutes too long make sure it won't be seeing top lists anytime soon. And then there's the script. That Brandt Ruger (Gene Hackman) curiously refrains from shooting Frank Calder, the man who kidnapped his wife and whom he specifically set out to kill, when he gets plenty of chances to do so, seems to occur for no other reason than to stretch a final showdown that could have taken place in the first half hour into almost two hours. The acting is in turns okay and wooden, generally of the 'good enough' or 'will have to do' variety. Oddly enough for a cast featuring a man who would go on to win the Oscar that same year for THE FRENCH CONNECTION and kickstart a brilliant career, the best thing about The Hunting Party is a man who made a career out playing Athos in The Three Musketeers. Oliver Reed looks just right for the part, in a role that would be played probably by Richard Boone 20 years earlier and Javier Bardem twenty years later. When he tries to emote and just do anything that doesn't involve looking mean and badass, he faulters, but he looks mean and badass for all but maybe 2 minutes in the film.