Richard Shepard
The Hunting Party

For the "missed opportunities" series: "The Hunting Party" (2007) is a film by Richard Shepard, a director who navigates between the big and small screens. Here he tells the adventures of 3 journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, and Jesse Eisenberg) up in the post-war Bosnian mountains. Gere doesn't have a dime, neither a house nor a car, but the old friend and colleague Duck (Terrence Howard) naturally follows him when it comes to getting an interview with the war criminal "the Fox," aka Radovan Karadzic, who will have to serve 40 years for crimes against humanity.

Now, the beginning is entertaining. We see the two reporters dodging mines and gunfire before being shocked by the reality of war. They get lost, one returns to America with a paid and calm job, while the other stays in Bosnia wandering around; after years and with the war long over, here comes the opportunity to hunt down Karadzic: no moral and ontological implications, no search for "journalistic" truth, but a response to an ever-present desire for revenge. This is where Hollywood makes its mark: a war film that surprisingly did not feature American heroes saving someone or bringing relief to those affected by the conflict. Too strange. So the journalists become heroes, fearless explorers of the dark Bosnian heights. And thus begins the search for the "Fox."

The cinematography and the eccentricity of some characters "keep afloat" Shepard's work, while everything else is nonsense and superficiality, from a plot of contrivances to "lucky" rescues and the improbability of the film's depiction, even though the film tells truths. But it's hard to believe that things actually went that way. Yet the ending leaves a bitter taste because Shepard (who also wrote the screenplay) hints that there was the possibility to tell something else: Karadzic was protected or at least forgotten by the CIA for reasons still unclear, just as many of the CIA's activities are ambiguous. Playing on those silences, on the distractions and the role of the American government, would not only have made the film more thrilling, which is essentially an adventure, but would have made it a political, committed title that could have revealed a bit more to the general public of that truth, which matters little to our three protagonists. In the end, we are faced with the usual clichés of tattooed and gruff Balkans, a pinch of American heroism, and the inevitable love story garnished with a desire for revenge.

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