Let’s Talk About Blumhouse’s The Hunt
All fiction has justice as a theme: the writer’s imposition of justice on an unjust world. Slasher films focus on an avenger punishing sinners. Caper films like Ocean’s Eleven take money away from the unworthy rich. In romantic comedies, the right people find love because love is an external force. When it comes to movies where justice isn’t imposed, like The Omen or The Last Seduction, the viewer is left unsettled, deliberately so: Gregory Peck fails to kill the Antichrist, and is shot by police; evil, manipulative Linda Fiorentino gets away with the money. You remember those endings. Justice is either served or denied, but it’s always there. Fictional justice is the proxy we use to salve the sting of living in a world that rarely offers closure, let alone just desserts.
Blumhouse, a production company responsible for woke films like Get Out and The Purge series, is releasing a movie called The Hunt through Universal Pictures. The Hollywood Reporter tells us:
The violent, R-rated film from producer Jason Blum’s Blumhouse follows a dozen MAGA types who wake up in a clearing and realize they are being stalked for sport by elite liberals.
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The script for The Hunt features the red-state characters wearing trucker hats and cowboy shirts, with one bragging about owning seven guns because it’s his constitutional right. The blue-state characters — some equally adept with firearms — explain that they picked their targets because they expressed anti-choice positions or used the N-word on Twitter. “War is war,” says one character after shoving a stiletto heel through the eye of a denim-clad hillbilly.
A quotable line from the movie explains, “Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”
The trailers suggest that it’s not all rainy days for the deplorables; the anti-hero protagonist is a woman who can, naturally, kick anyone and everyone’s ass without difficulty, and she turns the tables on the wealthy hunters. It’s supposed to be satire. You’re supposed to laugh. Justice will be served: first to the right-wingers, then to the progressives who hunted them. Don’t get mad, snowflake: it’s all very even-handed.
One cannot overestimate the outrage that Trump’s election elicited among our self-appointed betters in the entertainment media. Despite their pleading and shrieking and bleating, they were roundly rejected by the American electorate, whom they contemn. To children who have never been told no, it was unthinkable, and the tantrum they’ve been throwing since November of 2016 has yet to abate. Aided by an equally outraged news media, they have unleashed a torrent of vitriol aimed at Trump voters that continues to bleed into their creative work, and The Hunt is no exception. This film is progressive wish fulfillment on the big screen, no different from the unwatchable Lions for Lambs and Redacted during the Bush era. It’s violent masturbatory fantasy writ large against the left’s enemies. It’s justice against the normals.
I haven’t seen the film and won’t; I’ve learned too much about it. Nor I would I eat a plate of dog shit served by a hostile chef, even if the shit has rainbow sprinkles. And while I understand that the movie’s supposed to be satire, I’ve seen what the progressive left has done to humor over the last several years, and I want none of it. They’re not funny. They’ve redefined humor to mean angry screed, and all the jokes go one way and not the other. Late-night comedy is gone. Destroyed. Stand-up comedy is going the way of the dodo. All that’s left is progressive rage masquerading as entertainment.
Blumhouse’s execrable Get Out received near-universal praise because it addressed racial politics the left’s way, and progressives really, really have to show moviemakers of color that they’re great, so much better than white people. Lacking the race angle, The Hunt won’t get the affirmative action review treatment. That will likely doom it to mediocre reviews at best, and it’ll fade into obscurity.
At least they’ll have gotten their revenge against the deplorables. That’ll teach them.
