The Hunted is the finest teaming of Best Supporting Actor winners since Cuba Gooding, Jr. and the late James Coburn in Snow Dogs.  It's also a very odd and completely unnecessary update of First Blood, the original Rambo film, with Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones replacing Sylvester Stallone and the late Richard Crenna.  Additionally, The Hunted is more of a sequel to The Fugitive than U.S. Marshals ever thought of being.  Not only does Jones sport a trendy Richard Kimble-type beard, there are also a couple of integral scenes involving waterfalls.  But mostly it's the Running, the Chasing and the Never Killing When You Have A Chance.

The Hunted begins as one would expect most action thrillers to start – with a Johnny Cash voiceover (?!) that dissolves into 1990 Kosovo, where we see Aaron Hallam (Del Toro, Traffic) bump off a Serbian general with the stealthy know-how of some kind of specially trained US soldier (we never really learn what the hell he is).  Hallam gets a Silver Star, but then is haunted by nightmares involving the horrible things he saw in Kosovo.

Meanwhile, L.T. Bonham (Jones, Men In Black II), the guy who trained Hallam, is working for the World Wildlife Federation up near Vancouver.  We first see Bonham tracking and aiding an injured wolf like some kind of frigging British Columbian Grizzly Adams.  Bonham was never in the service, but he did train many, many elite soldiers.  He also has never killed a man, so you pretty much know where The Hunted is headed. 

When four men are found brutally murdered in the woods of Oregon and Washington, the Feds call in Bonham for reasons that are never made clear (can they really tell it was one of his trainees just from the crime scene?).  It seems Hallam has gone off the deep end and can no longer distinguish mission from reality.  Or maybe he has another story, deeply entrenched in top-secret government conspiracies.  It's tough to say because we don't really find out what his deal is.  But who cares about plot holes when you have the Running and the Chasing, etc.?

It's a little surprising when Hallam and Bonham lock horns within the first 30 minutes, and even more of a shock when the former is captured within the first 40.  But the The Hunted pulls the Escaping out of its bag of tricks, followed by more Running and Chasing.  And then more Escaping.  At one point, Bonham has to track Hallam on a crowded street, which made me think of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.  In another part, both men – the one chasing and the one being chased, mind you – interrupt their fast-paced flight at the exact same time to – get this – make their own knives!  I could barely contain the Giggling.

Actually, the knife-play is the best part of The Hunted, including the ridiculous finale in which the two men go at it until they're practically cubed, marinated and ready to grill.  Thankfully, Augie Hess's editing isn't as choppy as what we've seen in recent action films (Cradle 2 the Grave, Shanghai Knights), so you can actually get a sense of who is doing what to whom.  Del Toro fractured his wrist during filming, so you know at least some of this shit had to have been semi-real.  His is an unusually off-putting performance – we're not sure what to make of Hallam, and that's the point. Jones, on the other hand, continues to be one-dimensional and overrated. The non-cutlery confrontations between the two leads lack the excitement of what we saw in The Fugitive, leaving The Hunted as the second bloated, unenjoyable, military-minded flick in as many weeks (following Tears of the Sun).

1:34 -

for strong bloody violence and some language