The Hunted (Widescreen Edition)

Directed by Academy Award winner William Friedkin, THE HUNTED follows FBI agent Abby Durrell (Nielson) and her new recruit, L.T. Bonham (Jones) - a specialist in deep-woods tracking, as they team up to track and hunt down trained assassin, Aaron Hallam (Del Toro), who made a sport out of fatally shooting deer hunters in the forests outside Portland, Oregon. Using his well-honed nature skills to locate Hallam, Bonham soon finds himself and his partner lured into a gut-wrenching game of cat and mouse. With ruthless precision and murderous skill, Hallam remains one step ahead of his pursuers as Bonham and Durrell try to outwit him in the natural and urban wildernesses before Hallem turns them into his next victims.

William Friedkin's taut direction highlights The Hunted, a bloodsport thriller that works best without dialogue. It's a prime vehicle for costars Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, whose rugged screen personas are perfectly matched in a manhunt between a military assassin and the man who trained him to kill. Traumatized by atrocities in Kosovo four years earlier (the site of an action-packed prologue), Hallam (Del Toro) is seemingly psychotic and now killing in the forests of Oregon; Bonham (Jones) is lured out of retirement by a tenacious FBI agent (Connie Nielsen) to end Hallam's murder spree. The hackneyed plot is derivative to a fault (no surprise from the screenwriters of Collateral Damage), and the whole movie's a foregone conclusion, but Friedkin inspires fine work from his well-trained stars while exploring the ambiguity of Hallam's character. Lushly photographed by Caleb Deschanel, The Hunted is a survivalist's dream, militarily authentic and most effective when its primal instincts are cinematically expressed. --Jeff Shannon