Dir: Richard Shepard USA 2007. 100mins
A textbook study in the dangers of trying to have one's cake and eat it, The Hunting Party mixes earnest sentimentality and black comedy in an unlikely yarn about the search for a Bosnian Serb war criminal by a maverick TV news crew. On one level, the film clearly wants to be a committed drama based on the well-documented mix of inertia and behind-the-scenes political manoeuvring that has allowed major war criminals targeted by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague to go free for so long.

But - perhaps fearing that the subject matter is just too depressing for mainstream audiences - writer-director Richard Shepard (The Matador) keeps his finger on the parody panic button, and presses it more and more desperately as the film progresses.

Released in the States by MGM, The Hunting Party may prove to be a difficult domestic sell: the Bosnian War is not high on the list of catchy themes right now, and the film's dark satirical vein may end up turning off those more worthy, liberal souls who would endorse a more conventional drama like Welcome to Sarajevo. Multiplex audiences with a high tolerance of tonal shift look to be the film's easiest target in the rest of the world - though The Hunting Party is not an obvious multiplex film. The film is based on an article by reporter Scott Anderson, a Bosnia veteran.

Five years after the end of the war, Anderson and four other colleagues decided, on a whim, to go in search of war criminal Radovan Karadzic, with the help of a former Serbian police officer who believed the group were CIA operatives. Shepard worked this base material into the story of Simon Hunt (Richard Gere), a US network TV war correspondent who cracks up on air one day while covering the Bosnian conflict and ends up as a washed-up freelancer filing reports for broadcasters in such minor places as Jamaica, Peru and even (gasp!) Germany.

Back in Sarajevo in 2000 to cover the fifth anniversary of the end of the conflict, Hunt meets up with his former cameraman sidekick, Duck (Terrence Howard), who has retired from active war zone service to a cushy studio job. Pretending that he has inside information about the whereabouts of an evil Bosnian Serb war criminal known as The Fox, Hunt talks a reluctant Duck into joining him to look for the fugitive from justice. Third member of the search party is Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), a fresh-out-of-college greenhorn reporter who is the son of the network vice-president.

Gere has fun with his portrayal of the raddled, alcoholic war-junkie reporter, and also manages to give his character a suggestion of depth that most of the rest of the film lacks. The conflicts between the three colleagues are utterly conventional (Duck, of course, gets to row a lot with Hunt about the craziness of the mission until he is forced to admit that nothing beats the adrenalin of being shot at, while Benjamin, the useless, daddy's-boy rookie, gets handed a contractual scene where he proves his worth and courage to his sceptical partners).

NATO commanders are portrayed as useless pen-pushers who have doughnuts flown in from Bonn and there's a hammed-up CIA-obsessed UN officer who seems to have read too many John Le Carre novels. The Fox himself is a stock Serbian baddie protected by vicious bodyguards, including a murderous psycho straight out of a Bond movie, with bad teeth and a forehead tattoo.

Its frequent descent into cliche and easy sentimental manipulation of its audience undermines The Hunting Party's stabs at pathos (Hunt is even provided with a murdered Bosnian Muslim girlfriend; the flashback scenes of their brief love affair look like Bollywood outtakes). And although there are moments when The Hunting Party is genuinely funny (especially a scene on a helicopter when the real CIA eventually turn up), the film's abrupt shifts in tone end up undermining the moral authority it tries to cling onto.

A final scene that gives the audience the satisfaction of lynch-mob justice - but wriggles out of endorsing it because this is cast as what might have happened, not what did happen - leaves a particularly unpleasant taste in the mouth.

The soundtrack seems affected by the same tonal schizophrenia as the script, veering from sentimental orchestral surges and Bosnian folk melodies to an ironic use of vintage pop standards like Two Tons of Love's It's a Bad Situation.

Written and directed by
Richard Shepard

Production companies
QED International

Co-production
Gran Via Productions
InterMedia

International sales
QED International

Producers
Mark Johnson
Scott Kroopf
Bill Block

Executive producers
Adam Merims
Paul Hanson

Cinematography
David Tattersall

Production design
Jan Roelfs

Editor
Carole Kravetz-Aykanian

Music
Rolfe Kent

Main cast
Richard Gere
Terrence Howard
Jesse Eisenberg

Topics