On the Wrong Track

The Hunting Party has less luck finding the right tone than its heroes have locating their quarry.

by Shaun Brady

Journalists abandoning all pretense to professional ethics and running off to hunt for a fugitive war criminal may seem a far-fetched premise, but Scott K. Anderson's 2000 Esquire article "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" relates just such a real-life tale. Anderson, Sebastian Junger and John Falk, in Bosnia for a reunion five years after they covered the Balkan conflict together, tried to track down Radovan Karadzic on a whim, along the way getting mistaken for CIA operatives and discovering that perhaps the powers that be really don't want these fugitives brought to justice.

In adapting Anderson's article, writer/director Richard Shepard has even less luck finding the right tone for his supposedly satirical dark comedy than his heroes have in locating their quarry. Names and situations are drastically altered in order to better comply with Hollywood stereotypes — rather than a trio of whimsical professional journos, we get Richard Gere as your standard world-weary war correspondent, complete with ever-handy flask and three-day stubble, and Terrence Howard as his gonzo cameraman, ponytailed and always ready with a Ramones tune. Both are dreadfully miscast, seeming fresh out of their trailers even after several days slumming through Bosnian villages.

Of course, the film assumes we need these smooth-talking Americans as a point of entry into the story, neglecting to personify the actual inhabitants of the region. As the hapless trio (Gere and Howard are joined by Jesse Eisenberg, a refreshingly understated comic relief as a network exec's son out to prove his mettle) get closer to the Karadzic stand-in, the locals take on the foreboding air of the villagers living just outside the castle walls in a Dracula film.

As the hunters run into bureaucratic lunacy with U.N. peacekeepers and eventually U.S. officials, the implications for another, ongoing fruitless hunt are obvious (though Shepard rubs it in with an end-credits crawl mentioning bin Laden), but again convention misdirects the satire. When Gere breaks down on-camera in the face of atrocities that he's forced to report "fairly," it's a fair jab at the complicity that mainstream media takes in governmental affairs by sugar-coating its reporting. But the revelation that his breakdown comes only after the war crimes touch him personally (complete with lush, romantic flashbacks to the gorgeous object of his affections — object being the operative word here) undermines all of that for cheap sentiment.

Too often, such banalities and jarring shifts in tone, not to mention the leads' unwillingness to play at anything more unpleasant than lovable rogues, fall short of the Three Kings tone Shepard's obviously shooting for. Like the elusive genocidal masterminds our heroes seek, a timely, intelligent take on these issues remains just out of reach.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Hunting Party | Directed by Richard Shepard | an MGM release