Recently I've come to learn the hard, unforgiving, yet understandable truth that our beloved Mr. Dafoe has an incredibly large *. With that said, here's my exaggerated review of his recent film, The Hunter.
Dafoe pretends in this movie that he's some type of hunter/mercenary guy who's off to the wilds of Tazmania to hunt down the possibly extinct, Tazmanian Tiger. His goal is to find it, kill it, extract some juicy good stuff, and then dispose of any evidence. Fun! I'm down! Whoa, hold your horses now. You have to wait for the good stuff around these parts. First we have to first wade through the trenches of this southern Australian state that's chock full of melodramatic, cliché ridden, audience toying clap-trap. Say what?
It doesn't take long to possibly realize this film may flop more than it flips - and flop it does, belly style. Forget about the lil girl who playfully swears like her dear old Daddy, forget about the amazing listening and drawing abilities of the mute little boy, hell, toss away the predictability of the unfriendly locals ("Bring the children inside. Hurry."), what you should focus most of your attention on is the lackluster screenplay and script. At times during the movie you could assume that the film was some type of dramatic improv session. There were at least a couple WTF moments that instantly make you question what the writers were thinking about. And really, the acting, no matter how understated it tried to be, was rather poor. Leading the way there is Frances O'Connor who bleeds out that she's an actress – she really did bring this movie down a peg with her overly feminine antics and greasy stallion face. I can't blame her entirely I suppose as there were even moments where I thought Mr. Big Dong was acting like a piece of petrified wood - which hurts me to say that. Wilem, the man, who played so many OTT roles so brilliantly, flounders about around Tazmania looking like a dead fish, using those wide-eyes and dead stares to rile up our emotions to no avail. The writing sucked here. Sucked! Shut up!
I'm pretty shocked (actually not at all) by the overly positive responses this film is getting. My biggest underlying issue with this film is that it tries to be too many things. Instead of focusing on the exploits of the hunter which are of a more mature and heady theme, the movie juggles bits of charm and light-hearted wishy-washy melodrama. To me it's an obvious attempt by the film-makers to cater to everyone involved. Not only did it not work, it was glaringly noticeable, more so in tone than anything else.
You'll probably like the film if you don't know any better, but you should know better. You should know that this movie, this disappointing tale of a hunter with a massive hanging genital should have delivered, and it didn't, because some jerks, whomever they might be, wanted to grease their monkey paws with the hopes of grabbing some more bananas. And again, O'Connor, stick to commercials.
