The Hunting Party

A darkly comedic, moralizing, and ultimately bankrupt war-journalist-turned-vigilante tale, Richard Shepard’s The Hunting Party falls well short of its potential. The film, which at one point bore the infinitely more amusing title Spring Break in Bosnia before test audiences shot down that one note of charm and wit, claims in its closing titles to be based on the experiences of several grizzled Bosnian War journalists who, years after the conflict, decided to journey up from Sarajevo to the mountains of Serbia in search of some of the world’s most wanted war criminals, many of whom were being hidden by sympathetic Serbians. Of course, those men sobered up and went back down the mountain (although not before being mistaken for CIA operatives). However, in recounting the tale of a fallen-from-grace war journalist (Richard Gere), who enlists his former cameraman (Terrence Howard) and a green, network executive’s son (Jesse Eisenberg, terrific) in a clandestine quest to capture a notorious Serbian war criminal, the film disappoints the viewer with its surface exploration of a fascinating, parochial, and still nationalistic Serbian present.

Shepard is at home in broad comedy, even when telling violent and morally complex tales, as he did in his hitman-with-a-midlife crisis dramedy The Matador, but here his sensibilities steer him toward manipulation of a probably all-too-willing audience.   Shepard’s trumped-up assumption that these three American journalists could apprehend a man as slippery as “The Fox” makes the ending of Three Kings seem plausible and uncompromising. Dylan Baker, playing an American CIA operative, saves the trio and briefly embodies American malfeasance in a monologue, but where’s the meat?

Even more dubious is the poetic justice meted out to The Fox by Gere, determined to avenge his Bosnian Muslim lover when he drops off his bound body in a Muslim settlement. What is gained from giving the audience this satisfaction? Is it a mature representation of the aftermath of the war in the Balkans?  Jesse Eisenberg and Diane Kruger do terrific supporting work and Terrence Howard coasts along, but one is consistently surprised by how little authenticity manages to make its way into this film, even if the bullet holes on the Sarajevo Holiday Inn are real. Amid the numerous American war films generating awards-season buzz in Telluride, Aspen, and Toronto this week, The Hunting Party brings up the rear. It takes a mordant and fascinating piece of recent European history and squanders it with unwillingness to treat its audience like adults.

                                                       Brandon Harris