Movie Analysis - The Hunted

What is this, the 3rd time I've mentioned The Hunted on this blog? That must just mean it's outstanding then. About two weeks ago I was flipping through the channels, and I came across it already in progress. Quick Recap: It's a 90-minute chase movie with Tommy Lee Jones pursuing Benecio del Toro, who appears to have gone out of his head.

I half-watched, since I'd already seen it before, but I also hopped on the Internet and looked up Ebert's review of it, because I usually find those pretty insightful. In his review, he mentions how Aaron Hallam (Benecio del Toro) discusses the number of chickens slaughtered per year, and asks FBI agents how they would feel if there was some being that treated humans with as little respect. Ebert mentions that it seems clear Hallam feels he is that being. Well, I'm not so obtuse* to have missed that, but it did raise a question in my mind I hadn't previously considered: Is L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) also one of these beings? The difference being that while Hallam is a "higher being" that preys on humans, Bonham is one that protects them.

Bonham is, after all, the one who taught Hallam (and others like him). He's the one who taught Hallam how to quickly, efficiently, quietly kill a man with a knife you make yourself, how to blend into the background, how to set traps. Skills Hallam used with great ability for the government (the opening sequence is Hallam, with a four-man team in Kosovo, killing a Serbian commander in the middle of a slaughter), but which are now being used without much regard for the victim. After Hallam is captured early in the film, he's turned over to the people he worked for, who will likely kill him themselves. They're after him because he was supposed to kill a diplomat, which he did, but he also killed the diplomat's family. Hallam's response is that they weren't his real family, they were soldiers, that he was set up. One of the "sweepers" comments that Hallam can't tell the difference between sharks and guppies anymore, but it's more likely that to Hallam, there isn't any difference. They're all just people, which to him is no different than saying such and such are "just animals".

It's interesting to contrast Hallam with Bonham. Bonham taught Hallam, but has never killed anyone himself, while Hallam has killed several people from what we know. During a flashback, Bonham sees himself training the group Hallam was in. As he tells them what they'll learn, he says how he'll teach them to kill, and the camera flashes to Hallam watching intently. However, when Bonham emphasizes that 'they will learn to survive. . . or they will not', the camera stays on him. I think that sums the two men up, that Hallam is (or became) a killer, while Bonham is a survivor. What he knows would keep him alive most anywhere, but he hasn't needed to kill. Hallam, unfortunately, has.

Bonham lives alone in the woods in the north, working with the Wildlife Fund as he puts it. Hallam is seemingly living in the a tree at the start of the chase, but also lived with a woman and her daughter for a time, and he seems to have taken a shine to the daughter, since there's a scene where he's working with her on recognizing animal tracks, and explains that when they hear the cat out in the yard, to leave it be, because it's hunting**. Both men seem to care about wildlife, as Bonham marches into an establishment near his home and warns the men there to stop using snare traps on wolves, as he'd just removed one from an injured wolf. Hallam, meanwhile, criticized some "hunters"*** for using such high-tech scopes to hunt deer.

Bonham seems less comfortable around people and civilization. When he's in the Feds building where they're interrogating Hallam, Bonham is constantly agitated, pacing, shaking his fingers, speaking monosyllabically. In contrast, Hallam, who's actually being interrogated, sits calmly, without a care. He blends in more readily in public, switching just a few clothes to appear like a construction worker, or a skater punk, or a homeless person, while Bonham runs about in the same dirty clothes with a heavy beard, looking like the Wild Man of the Mountain. And yet, this may be why he works as a "protector". Hallam has clearly been warped by his missions, especially the Kosovo one, when he was forced to ignore entire families being drug into rooms and shot to pieces, because his mission was simply to kill the Serb commander****. Bonham, meanwhile, hasn't been exposed to that. He's seen the casual attitude people can have towards harming animals, but not nearly as much the lack of concern they can have for harming each other. I think that's part of why he's determined to stop Hallam, as he might not feel the same had he seen what his protege has.

Watching the chase/battle between the two men is fascinating. They seem totally aware of their environments, of all the people around them, but they don't really seem to touch them, as though they were separate. They move through the city or the woods disturbing very little, which would suggest they were being extra cautious. But they move in a way that suggests they aren't all that concerned with what's around them, because there are more important things at hand. Rain and mud are nothing, the same with swimming across a river. The cold is irrelevant, especially to L.T., who leaves his coat behind early, and never bothers to retrieve it. It's as if everything else falls away around them, just leaving two guys trying to kill one another. Each has an uncanny knack for knowing whether the other is, and where they'll be. It is easier for Hallam, since he knows Bonham will be wherever he is, but no matter how clever Hallam is, Bonham always susses out where he is. This doesn't mean Bonham doesn't still get caught off guard, or that he figures it out in time, but it's evident their minds are on the similar paths. In contrast, the feds, cops, the "sweepers", they can't see what he's doing, and so they continue to fall for his misdirections, and to underestimate him. It goes beyond one having taught the other*****, to the point where they almost sense each other. As if they're attuned to each other on a wavelength no one else can find.

There's one other sequence I think is significant. During the chase, Hallam has made his way onto the town's train system, with Bonham right behind him. Law enforcement closes off the the bridge and stops the train. Hallam climbs out, and begins climbing a ladder to the top of the bridge, as the lead Fed announces "target of opportunity, open fire!" The whole scene is reminiscent of King Kong, or any other movie where people with guns attempt to kill the "monster", a monster which is often misunderstood by those same people with guns, because they fear (perhaps with good reason). Yet, as badly as Abby wanted Hallam for killing her fellow agents, she orders cease fire when Bonham continues his pursuit (in spite of his fear of heights, no less). Is it just because she recognizes him as an ally, or has he not completely reached that level Hallam's at, and so he's not different enough yet?

By the end of the flick, Bonham's got blood all over him, his and Hallam's, and he's finally really used the stuff he taught, but how different was what he chose to do from what Hallam had been getting ordered to do? I think it's the reasons behind it. Hallam had been, originally, killing because he was told to, and later, because he believed himself to be a target (which is at least partially true). Bonham does it out of a sense of responsibility, to the people Hallam's recently killed, but also to Hallam himself, I think. Hallam reached out to L.T. for help at one point, and received none. That may have made the difference.

* I really like "obtuse", ever since I heard Andy DuFrense use it in The Shawshank Redemption when talking to the warden. Boy, did I enjoy watching the warden kill himself. With some villains, it's just more satisfying to watch them descend so low they finish the job themselves, hence my wish for Superboy-Prime to reality-wall punch himself out of existence.

** Throughout the film, I get the feeling these are important skills, that are passed down through generations. Bonham learned them from his father, and passed them on to all those soldiers. Hallam probably took to them better than any other, making him L.T.'s son in a sense. Now Aaron is passing them on to Loretta, who isn't his daughter, but clearly looks up to him, and he seems to care for her, and her mother for that matter. Hallam isn't completely beyond humanity.

*** Hallam contends they were actually there to kill him, and I think he's right. As Abby and Bonham noted, neither of the hunters brought a knife to quarter the deer, or anything to carry meat in, little suspicious.

**** There's a sequence right before Hallam completes the mission, where the commander orders one of his soldiers to continue killing, and level the village. The solider comments that the NATO air strike might do that for him. The commander says 'The West can not solve this. The war started here. It will end here.' That has some deeper meaning to the movie, but I can't quite determine what it is. The futility of what Hallam's doing, killing this one commander, while the soldiers were slaughter hundreds, and the idea that it may never stop, so Hallam is destroying himself for nothing? Is it an idea that the conflict between Bonham and Hallam is somehow older than it would appear, and the West is law enforcement, and ultimately powerless to do anything? I don't care for that last one (yet I thought of it, what the hell?), since it smacks of predestination, or it may just be taking the higher being thing too far. Also, for some reason it's making me think of that horrific story Jeph Loeb did in Wolverine, where we learn Logan and Sabretooth are part of two lineages that are always fighting, and you distinguish them by their hair color or some such dumbassery?

***** Especially since you'd think that Hallam would have learned some new things, by necessity, while in the field.