Shepard has a killer eye for the things that rob us of our humanity and the lengths to which we will go get it back. He turned former 007, Pierce Brosnan, into a louche, paranoid, jittery trainwreck of an assassin in 2005’s comic gem The Matador and he attempts to pull off a similar feat with Gere in The Hunting Party, but this time the strain of making the iconic Gere a more humanized, non-Hollywood presence shows through the black comedy and the resulting film is a mixed blessing: half self-rigtheous anti-authoritarian screed, half pitch-black comedy, but with no cohesive tone to speak of. It’s a film filled with terrific sequences that never completely link up, as if Oliver Stone had reshot Salvador and called it Sarajevo and then forgotten to include James Woods. Gere plays an emotionally battered war correspondent whose career is in tatters after he loses it live on the six o’clock news while reporting from a Bosnian killing field. That was then, and now his former buddy and cameraman (Howard) has returned to the Balkans on a cushy assignment. The pair meet up, make up, and go off, disguised as – what else? – journalists, to catch the Fox, the local war criminal hiding in plain sight. Along the way, they’re not only mistaken for a CIA hit squad but also run afoul of booze, bad memories, and all manner of wholly improbable semi-adventures. Based on an equally unlikely (but true) piece of Esquire reportage, The Hunting Party comes close to being a genuinely affecting, honestly uproarious film in the Welcome to Sarajevo vein, but Shepard’s panicky, adrenalized script instead ricochets from moments of horrific violence to Gere, Howard, and Jesse Eisenberg (as the tag-along son of the network VP) yukking it up behind a scrim of steely battlefield regret. The most exciting part of the film is the end credits, which come complete with a real-world epilogue and reveal the actual journalists the film is based on. Nothing Gere or Howard do throughout the wild and woolly tale come close to that still-frame of their paunchy, beer-swilling templates grinning ear-to-ear, which makes me wish this had been a straight documentary rather than the convoluted and emotionally diluted semistraight feature film that it is.
This article appears in December 7 • 2007.