I’m not sure why this nifty little action flick doesn’t have more of a rep, because it’s pretty good stuff and features a pretty good cast. It’s no classic, but it’s exactly what you’re hoping for when you bring back a random action flick from the video store, or, I guess more accurately these days, Netflix. In other words, it’s a film that doesn’t try to rise above what it is, but instead seeks to deliver the goods. And so it does.
Christopher Lambert is a pretty average (realistically so, to boot) businessman in Japan for a sales conference. Rather than partying with his coworkers, he returns to his hotel, and ends up hooking up with the insanely gorgeous Joan Chen. They spend the night together, and then Lambert has the misfortune to not only see a ninja squad committing a murder, but to see the face of their leader, Jone Lone. Naturally, this marks him for death.
After surviving a second attempt on his life, Lambert ends up under the protection of the old-fashioned samurai Takeda. Takeda’s family has a long-running feud with Lone’s ninja crew, and intends to use Lambert as bait to draw Lone into a final conflict. Lambert, meanwhile, eventually sickens of being a pawn, and strives to gain control over his own destiny.
As you can see, this is pretty rote stuff, but it’s all in the execution. Everybody in the cast can act—even Lambert does a good job here, and aside from this and his delirious turn in Mortal Kombat, I was never a fan—while action buffs of a certain age will wonder why Lone didn’t have a bigger career. Chen is simply luminous, and Lambert’s apparent befuddlement at getting to spend a night with this woman is entirely believable.
Although the violence is at a much more mild level than it is today in our Kill Bill and Sin City world, the movie does have a point where it went a lot farther than I anticipated back when I saw it in the theater, in that manner that inspires pure giddiness in the geek heart. Like all good movie, this also does the little things well, including a set-up that actually makes the otherwise completely ridiculous ending somewhat credible. Helping things in that direction is that the film can be taken as a ghost story (and like all good ghost stories, and also be taken as not a ghost story), allowing for beyond the grave intervention to help explain Lambert’s otherwise inexplicable continued existence.
I don’t want to blow much more of this, but you could certainly do worse. It does kind of make you wonder why writer/director J. F. Lawton didn’t get more work. He wrote the actually fairly amusing Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death; sadly wrote the most horrendous movie I was ever forced to sit through, Pretty Woman; wrote the superior Under Siege but also the lame Blankman and Chain Reaction; and after making this ended up as the house writer and occasional helmer on the Pamela Anderson show V.I.P., which to be fair was fairly watchable. He wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Death Race 2000 redo, so hopefully that will be one of his good scripts.
The Hunted would make a good double bill with Robert Mitchum’s The Yakuza, and even better a triple bill with Scott Glenn’s The Challenge, although appallingly that last film isn’t out on DVD yet. Good stuff.
