"Hunting Party" misses its target

When the Academy Award nominations were announced this week, I read a number of articles heralding the studio subsidiary system, a system that allows for independent-minded films like "No Country for Old Men," "Juno," and "There Will Be Blood," to mention just three Oscar contenders, to even get made. Without such a system, you could picture a scene in which the Coen brothers were summoned to the office of some major studio honcho who told them: "The screening last night was OK, nothing to write home about, but we do have one major problem. It's the ending. The audience's reaction to the ending practically tanks the entire project. So we huddled immediately after the screening and Arthur down in accounting came up with a new ending that we believe might salvage the entire project so I'm putting him in charge of shooting some additional footage." The result probably would be a movie with a bigger box office than "No Country" has earned to date, but without any of the critical plaudits.

But sometimes, I am thinking, that kind of oversight can be a good thing. Take Richard Shepard's "The Hunting Party" for example. Shepard made the funny, entertaining "The Matador," a satire involving the psychological flameout of a Mafia-type hitman. Shepard tries to take the same approach to "The Hunting Party," which purports to be a satire involving the psychological flameout of a TV newsman. This idea worked to perfection in Sidney Lumet's "Network" because the satirical target there was network news' cravings for higher ratings. It doesn't work here because the satirical target is the Bosnian war and someone should have been in a position to tell Shepard there is absolutely nothing funny about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The film is based on an Esquire magazine article written by Scott Anderson that wasn't funny either (nor was it intended to be). It told the story of five journalists, one of whom was Mr. Anderson himself, who had covered the Bosnian war and held a reunion in Sarajevo five years after the war. Before long, the group was mistaken for a C.I.A. hit squad hunting for fugitive Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

In the very beginning of "The Hunting Party," a title card flashes on the screen that reads "Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true." I don't believe that at all. I think all the ridiculous parts --and there are way too many of them -- are fiction and the only scene with a kernel of truth is one in which TV journalist Simon Hunt (Richard Gere), his long-time cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) and the third member of their team, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg, pictured above with Gere and Howard) meet four other journalists in a Sarajevo bar.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Gere is terribly miscast as the grizzled Hunt (sorry, Richard, you're just too inherently elegant to ever pull off "grizzled) who had his psychological flameout during a live news segment during the war, after which Duck (Howard's immense talents are wasted in this role) left the war zone to return to network headquarters as the lead cameraman on the network news. It's now five years later. Hunt has faded into oblivion and Duck returns to Sarajevo with the network anchorman (James Brolin) for a celebration marking the anniversary of the war's end. Of course he runs into Hunt who tells him he knows where the No. 1 war criminal is hiding and together they could go to the hideout and film an exclusive interview. This, of course, would be tantamount to someone from one of the national networks tracking down Osama Ben Laden for an interview today.

The script inserts the Benjamin character because the audience needs to learn the real motivations of Hunt's character and other background on the war, and the easiest way to do that is to invent a character that Duck can explain all this to.

The problem is that Shepard never elevates this to the level of satire the way he managed to do with "The Matador." Instead we get jokes involving midgets, a waiter shooting at Hunt because he didn't pay his dinner bill and a shadowy C.I.A. operative whose ultimate fate, we are told, might be that he is eaten by squirrels in Africa (that actually reads funnier than it plays). We also get with Hunt every single cliche that surrounds a "grizzled TV newsman." This doesn't belong in Esquire as much as it does Amazing Wonder Stories.

Grade: D+