 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Hunt Club • Year: 2022 • Country: USA • Director: Elizabeth Blake-Thomas • Main cast: Mena Suvari, Casper Van Dien, Will Peltz, Maya Stojan, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Belkin • Runtime: 88 minutes • Production company: Latigo Films, Matt Dean Films, Titan Global Entertainment, Uncork’d Entertainment (distribution) • TRAILER
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As a fan of action and horror movies, Hunt Club (2022) was, by definition, something I had to watch. But this is not my first rodeo, I knew what to expect, and I didn’t get disappointed at all, the movie delivers what it promises, nothing more and nothing less.
Hunt Club (2022) is a straight-to-the-point action thriller with a background of horror. The premise is very simple and not the most original one, but that won’t stop the watching experience to be an entertaining one. A woman joins a group of hunters not knowing that she is going to be their prey.
The movie tries to add something else besides the blind action to the story and enters in a sort of criticism of the raise of misogynist men we are dealing with in the world due to the escalation of feminist conscience and the women empowerment we are having worldwide. The men in the film are pictured as brainless testosterone unidirectional predators, sometimes also rapists, while the women are the innocent ones trying to act in a model of sisterhood if they want to survive, which not all of them do and they pay with their own life. The message is not the problem, and although taken to an extreme it’s a good reflection of the minds of some of the individuals we can encounter in our daily lives, in our circle of friends, at work, on the TV, within the politicians, etc. But, perhaps, both sides of the conflict are too caricatured and the whole message gets diluted as a joke. Still, this is not a real issue since we didn’t choose this movie as a lecture or a social-politic bulletin, we’re here for plain entertainment, a bunch of killings, a few chases, and some bloody sequences.
Mena Suvari plays the lead, the woman who has been lured into that hunt and must fight for her survival. Although the times when she was one of the most promising young actresses after having starred in essential titles like American Pie (1999), American Beauty (1999), Loser (2000), and Spun (2002) are gone, she still proves to be in an excellent shape, both physically and in acting skills. And opposite to her, Casper Van Dien plays the ruthless leader of the hunting clan, in another classic Van Dien performance. He will never outstand as one of the most expressive or credible actors out there but the man has his own charisma and he has managed to make himself an undebatable spot as a proficient b-movie star. And, finally, in the role of the rude and disgusting sidekick for the bad guys we have Mickey Rourke, whose job here is to portray a very disgusting dude and he masters it.
Those are the ingredients, together with a story that never tries to fool anyone, and the directing duties that won’t charm the sybarites of movie making but accomplishes well what a low-budget survival action thriller must deliver. Hunt Club (2022) is a movie with no pretensions besides entertaining and having the audience have a good time for an hour and a half. And in that, it succeeds. It is not the best humans-hunting-humans out there, Hard Target (1993), Surviving the Game (1994), The Hunted (2003), or the recent The Furies (2019), and The Hunt (2020), are better films inspired by the humans-hunting-humans story The Most Dangerous Game, probably the first fiction piece of the subgenre, but it is still a fun watch.
As a little informative pearl, Casper Van Dien participated last year in another remake of the novel The Most Dangerous Game and its film version The Most Dangerous Game (1932), also entitled The Most Dangerous Game (2022). Coincidence? Well, yes, probably it is a coincidence, but there he is! Being one of the b-movie stars we need! Kudos to Casper.
RATE: 5.5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt21220802
