“Hunt Club” Movie Review

 

“Hunt Club”

 

Movie Review

Hunt Club, starring Mena Suvari, Casper Van Dien, Will Peltz, Maya Stojan, and Mickey Rourke, was written by David Lipper and John Saunders and directed by Elizabeth Black-Thomas. The story of the film revolves around a gang of male hunters who periodically entice women to their island with the promise of winning $100,000 in a hunt, only to find that they are the ones being pursued. They mess with the wrong girls this time, and they must face the consequences.

After starring in Justin Lee's adaption of The Most Dangerous Game in August, Casper Van Dien is back in Hunt Club, a different take on the topic of hunting people. He plays Carter in this scene, taking his son Jackson (Will Peltz), who is going on "a very significant weekend" for him. They encounter Mena Suvari's character Cassandra at a restaurant where Tessa, played by Maya Stojan, recently walked out after an argument with her. She is invited to go hunting with them for the weekend, where there is a chance to win $100,000. They set out for the island together with Teddy, Preston, and Lexi. They run into Conrad and Williams there.

The opening act of Hunt Club has very little that seems genuine or authentic. The interactions between Carter, Jackson, and Cassandra aren't at all believable, and neither is the conversation. From the minute the women enter and Cassandra begins to look at Jackson until she decides to leave with these two new males, everything sounds and seems artificial.

From there, it doesn't get much better. On a sugar daddy website, Lexi is depicted as a bimbo who hooked up with Teddy and Preston. When was the last time you heard the word masculinity without the word toxic connected to it? Carter asks the hunters as Virgil leads the first of the hunted into the woods. She also claims that males are physically being castrated for possessing a Y chromosome. It is difficult to take anything about Hunt Club seriously because there is no attempt to develop real characters; instead, there are over-the-top cartoonish stereotypes. We are expected to take everything seriously by the director and her writers. But the effect is exactly the opposite when one of the hunters impales his victim while pulling a face straight out of a Wrong Turn sequel.

Hunt Club attempts a few twists around the time Cassie and Yvette, a stereotypically irate black lady, are carried outside to be hunted, but you'll have seen them coming from a long way off. If you were thinking that the movie would at least quicken its pace now, you were mistaken. The action moments in the movie are primarily saved for the final half-hour, but there aren't many of them, and they aren't very well done. Several events—including the payoff that should have concluded the movie—take place off-screen, and the viewer only gets to see the consequences.

Hunt Club ought to have been a truly awful movie. The villains' speeches, though, seem like they were lifted from an incel troll bot on Twitter since the producers spend way too much time letting them speak. They may have been perceived as menacing rather than comical with a few sentences here and there to make their opinions apparent. But, in its current form, that and a lack of suspense, action, or logic make this one club you don't want to join.

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