The best single thing in “The Hunting Party” is James Brolin, which is not an observation that can be made about many films featuring the former “Marcus Welby” star and current Barbra Streisand husband.
But Brolin is meticulous and hilarious in “The Hunting Party,” where he plays a network news anchor. His stentorian voice and equally stentorian toupee recall the heyday of Sam Donaldson, and Brolin’s TV-ready body language is just as precise as his hairpiece.
Alas, Brolin is only in a handful of scenes in “The Hunting Party,” an otherwise middling comedy-drama about the aftermath of the war in the Balkans. The rest of the picture can’t quite settle on whether it’s a buddy movie or a political broadside.
It’s a fictionalized version of a true story about war correspondents who take it upon themselves to track down a notorious Serbian war criminal, who’s still at large a few years after the end of the war. Here, the most charismatic of the journalists is a former TV reporter (Richard Gere) who’s been bouncing around the fringes since suffering an on-air meltdown. His philosophy: “Putting your life in danger is living. The rest is television.”
After an unnecessarily long prologue, Gere corrals his former shooter (Terrence Howard), who’s become a soft, highly paid studio cameraman. They are joined in the foolish endeavor by a network producer (Jesse Eisenberg) who looks as though he hasn’t gone through puberty yet.
The idea has possibilities, and the movie scores lots of points against the ineffectual United Nations and the shadowy CIA. Both entities appear capable of doing something about the war criminal if they wanted to. But they don’t.
Which is how the three journalists appoint themselves to find the guy. There’s supposed to be some tension about whether Gere is really going to kill the quarry when they find him (to settle an old grudge), instead of simply capture him for the money. But the audience is unlikely to actually wonder which way this will go.
Terrence Howard, seen last week in “The Brave One,” plays the central role, and he nicely captures his character’s exasperation as well as his guiltly feelings about quitting important news work.
Eisenberg was one of the kids in “The Squid and the Whale,” and is a very amusing young actor. Gere is all right, although this is not at the level of his resurgence earlier this year in “The Hoax,” that unexpected sleeper.
Writer-director Richard Shepard got some attention with “The Matador,” an uneven but sometimes crackling movie with Pierce Brosnan as a neurotic hit man. Shepard definitely scores a few points here, mostly in a black-comic vein, but this movie doesn’t come together often enough. And, for sure, there’s not enough James Brolin.
The Weinstein Co. photo
Jesse Eisenberg (left), Terrence Howard and Richard Gere star in “The Hunting Party.”
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