Credibility, great script elude 'The Hunting Party'
"The Hunting Party" -- in which Richard Gere and Terrence Howard play American journalists hunting a Serbian war criminal who bears a suspicious resemblance to Radovan Karadzic -- is a movie, based (loosely) on fact, that would like to be a modern version of Carol Reed's "The Third Man."
But it doesn't measure up.
For one thing, this movie doesn't have great plangent Anton Karas zither music, like "Third Man." For another, it doesn't have Vienna and Orson Welles (talking about cuckoo clocks) in black and white. Most importantly, it lacks the kind of script Graham Greene wrote, full of satire, corruption and melancholy.
Still, the mere fact that so many people involved -- writer-director Richard Shepard, producer Mark Johnson and star Gere -- keep invoking "Third Man" as their model is a hopeful sign. After all, many American moviemakers these days only aspire to making another "American Pie."
Shepard's sassy script was inspired by the Esquire magazine article "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," by Scott Anderson, in which five writers (including Anderson and Sebastian Junger of "The Perfect Storm") decide to spend their off-time in 2000 hunting for Karadzic and get mired in a swamp of double-crosses and danger, after their main contact mistakes them for a CIA hit squad.
Shepard's last show was the highly entertaining neo-noir comedy "The Matador," with Pierce Brosnan as a real hit man and Greg Kinnear as his reluctant buddy. Shepard isn't trying to dumb down this material, but he does. The movie reduces the five journalists to three, surrounds them with obvious foreign intriguers who couldn't have gotten a forged passport to Greene's Vienna, and cooks up a fall-and-redemption saga that reminds us of seedier reporters in better movies (such as Oliver Stone's "Salvador").
Gere plays Simon Hunt, a former star TV anchorman who cracked up on camera, got fired, stayed around Sarajevo and is now anxious to recover old glory by persuading his crack ex-cameraman pal Duck (Howard) to help track down a notorious Serbian war criminal (Ljubomir Kerekes), now called simply "The Fox" (why not Zorro?).
Duck is seeking redemption, too, after the easy success and compromise of his life back in Manhattan. Playing against each other in these flawed-hero roles, Gere and Howard do click together, Gere in his sly, shrewdly charming mode, Howard expertly playing bemused and solid.
It's the third man in "The Hunting Party" script who's the problem. Perhaps to lure in younger audiences, the filmmakers have recruited Jesse Eisenberg ("The Squid and the Whale") to play Benjamin, the initially clueless producer son of a network veep, and the last guy you'd want on an expedition like this -- especially if you ever wanted to work at a network again.
In the racy, lively tale that follows -- involving death squads, midgets and two beauties (Diane Kruger as Bosnian shady lady Mirjana and Kristina Krepela as Simon's wartime love Magda) -- credibility proves as elusive as The Fox.
Truth to tell, I sort of liked the movie, though not as much as "The Matador." Somewhat senseless it might be, but "Hunting Party" shows us a pretty good time. Gere and Howard are fun to watch and production designer Jan Roelfs, who did most of Peter ("The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover") Greenaway's gorgeous art films, makes everything look loose, deadly and romantic.
But another "Third Man"? Not quite. Too bad they couldn't find another Greene. Or at least another zither.
"The Hunting Party"
2 ½ out of four
Opens today
Richard Gere as Simon Hunt
Terrence Howard as Duck
Jesse Eisenberg as Benjamin
Written and directed by Richard Shepard; based on an article by Scott Anderson. Produced by Mark Johnson, Scott Kroopf and Paul Hanson. An MGM/Weinstein Company release. Rated R (language, violence). Running time: 103 minutes.