Review by Jay Pinkerton

View This Trailer

"Hey, by the way, have you seen that trailer for The Hunted yet?" a friend asked me over the phone this week. I said I had.

"Doesn't it look identical to—?"

"Yeah, I know," I said. "It's almost creepy."

Then, earlier yesterday, I was out with another friend combing used bookstores for a magazine he needed to complete a collection. At some point, coincidentally enough, the topic came up again.

"Hey, that Hunted movie — looks exactly like First Blood, doesn't it?" he asked, flipping through a dusty rack of old back issues.

(Please note that I present both of these conversations as snippets of a greater whole in order to make a point about The Hunted — and not to suggest that every male friend I have spends every waking moment talking about soon-to-be-released Benicio Del Toro movies. We also talk about girls, hockey, bands, girls we'd sleep with if given the chance, and how one might go about getting that chance. Other than that, though, admittedly it's pretty much just Benicio Del Toro movie talk non-stop.)

Given that the similarities between the two films are pronounced enough to keep coming up as a quirky conversational topic, I can only assume that many other people are also making this connection and having a quick laugh at The Hunted's expense; much like everyone had a quick laugh about Hollywood's stupidity a few years back, when they released those two asteroid movies within months of each other. Even my dad — who watches maybe one movie a decade, usually under duress from the rest of the family, and tends to sit through its duration with his arms crossed, glaring at the television as if it were a loud and obnoxious houseguest telling lurid anecdotes and cutting occasional loud farts directly into the sofa cushions — noticed the similarity between The Hunted and First Blood, even though he has, to the best of my knowledge, seen neither film. I tend to use my father as a kind of "media awareness" litmus test. So if we happen to be watching the game, and after a commerical break he says: "Didn't they already make that movie? It starred Rambo, didn't it?", that to me is a clear indication that Hollywood hasn't waited nearly long enough for a film to fade from the public consciousness before cannibalizing and repackaging it.

Keeping this in mind, I have elected not to harp on about the similarities between these movies. I'm assuming most people have already made this mental connection and moved on. Instead, I thought I'd do the makers of The Hunted a public service, and call attention to the many differences between the two films. Hopefully they'll take note and cut me a big check for my troubles.

• The film First Blood stars Sylvester Stallone as a highly trained war veteran who snaps, and must be stopped by his old commander, played by Richard Crenna. In The Hunted, these roles are played by completely different actors.



• In The Hunted, the scenes where unstable war veteran Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro) hunts people for sport were shot in a forest in Oregon. In First Blood, John Rambo hunts people for sport in a forest in Oregon — yet the scenes were actually shot in Hope, British Columbia.



• In First Blood, Commander Trautman (Crenna) warns the local police force that if they hunt John Rambo, "Remember one thing. A good supply of body bags." In the trailer for The Hunted, Lieutenant Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) warns the local police force: "You'd better decide what's an acceptable body count. Because that's what's going to happen if you let these boys declare war on my boy." The police force's supply of body bags is never addressed.



• In First Blood, Commander Trautman explains that John Rambo was taught "to kill. Period." Conversely, Lieutenant Bonham explains that Aaron Hallam was taught "to kill. Quickly. Accurately. Efficiently." Rambo and Hallam were taught wildly divergent methods of killing.



• Lieutenant Bonham explains the training: "The physical part is easy. The difficult part… is turning it off." John Rambo, conversely, on the training: "You just don't turn it off!" The dialogue in these films often use different words in their sentences.



• Aaron Hallam and John Rambo have very different haircuts.



• First Blood was made in1982. The Hunted was made twenty years later.



• Though the booby traps Hallam and Rambo set in the woods are identical, the ropes used to bind the booby traps have different knots.



• First Blood is based on the novel by David Morell. The Hunted, conversely, is not based on a book at all but on a film.

So there you have it. Just to double-check things, I surfed over to the official site and the IMDb and looked for any kind of indication that The Hunted is a remake of First Blood (I'd look pretty silly, after all, making all these jokes if it turned out it was an intentional homage). Well, if it is, they don't take great pains to show it — it's not mentioned once on either page, and nobody associated with First Blood is mentioned in the writing credits. Who wants to bet, however, that once the overwhelmingly bad impression people are taking away from the trailer gets back to the producers, we'll be seeing a lot of television spin about how it's a "tribute" and a "remake" in an eleventh-hour attempt at damage control? We'll see in a week, I suppose.