Word: friedkinã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2003-2003
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...action film aspiring to psychoanalytic significance, The Hunted—the latest from The Exorcist director William Friedkin??begins with a quote from the Bible, as interpreted by Bob Dylan: “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’” The plot follows accordingly, setting peace-loving L.T. Hallam (a mountain man reminiscent of Jack London, played by Tommy Lee Jones) on the trail of Aaron Hallam (Benicio del Toro), when the latter—a Special Forces superman scarred by his service in Kosovo?...
Nevertheless, Oedipal conflict certainly plays a role in the subtext of the film. Hallam’s spooky taunting of his victims, hunters who search for deer with high powered scopes, applies as much to Friedkin??s directorial predecessors as to the trigger-happy “businessmen from Medford” who become Hallam’s first victims: “There’s no reverence in what...
Directorial one-upmanship and the censure of Friedkin??s predecessors for an overreliance on technology in action films perhaps lie behind such comments. Although moral lines become fuzzy within the film, the meta-filmic lines of combat stay fairly stable: Friedkin lives up to his goal, producing a nauseatingly violent action film without any key high-tech, high-caliber sequences...
Aside from occasional excesses (which are, perhaps, simply inherent in the genre of action film), what results from Friedkin??s attempt at violence-without-bullets is an amalgamation of Saving Private Ryan, The Fugitive and a 1980s slasher movie: historical context, Tommy Lee on the tail of the bad guy and blood and guts squirting all over the place...
| 1 |