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The Hunting Party

Confident wits collide

By MARK BAZER | September 18, 2007

3.0 Stars

THE HUNTING PARTY: Gere and Howard grow tiresome, but it hardly matters.

Writer/director Richard Shepard knows how to make a movie a good time, even one set in the physically and psychologically wrecked post-war Balkans. Shepard’s previous outing, The Matador, mixed comedy and slickness with tragedy in awkward fashion, but that’s just what his subject here calls for. Richard Gere and Terrence Howard play a network-news reporter/cameraman team who for years enjoyed the “nonstop erection that comes from fear and death and war.” Now, their careers have taken different paths, and it’s only a tip on the whereabouts of a Serbian war criminal that brings them back together. They’re journalists pretending (to others and themselves) to be CIA, and their banter is that of people whose main point of reference is the movies. Gere and Howard grow tiresome and the adventure plot is a letdown, but The Hunting Party whirls by with such wit and confidence that such petty details hardly matter.

Related: Video clips(2), New to DVD for the week of January 3, 2006, Con but not forgotten, More

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