Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.


Back when Terrence Howard was still and up-and-coming actor, he was capable of doing something I'll never forget. Even in the smallest supporting parts, his performances would make your eyes drift from the main actor to what he was doing. He wasn't hamming it up or showboating; he was just acting like any good actor would. But something about him made you pay attention to him. The prime example of this phenomenon was a little film called THE BEST MAN, in which Howard played one of several groomsmen for a friend getting married. The film was OK, but if you go back and read the original reviews for it, you'll see a chorus of critics effectively asking the same thing: who is this Terrence Howard, and how can we see more of him? Cut to today. He has two movies in theaters right now (this and THE BRAVE ONE), and although technically he's billed as second lead in both, he's the one you pay attention to. He's the one whose character goes through the changes, who compromises his beliefs, who puts himself in harm's way for the sake of a friend. The two films could not be more different, but Howard manages two very different, equally strong performances in both.


Writer-director Richard Shepard (fresh off the tremendous film THE MATADOR) has made another superb work with THE HUNTING PARTY, a story of two television journalists (a reporter and a cameraman) who decide that unbiased reporting isn't enough. For years, the two men (Howard as cameraman Duck and Richard Gere as correspondent Simon Hunt) has traveled the world planting themselves in the hottest hot zones in the middle of war-torn nations such as Iraq, El Salvador, Somalia and Bosnia, the country that eventually broke them and broke them up after Simon went on a live on-air rant that cost him his job. We see snippets of the two dodging bullets and flying debris, filming the worst kind of atrocities, and listening to the lies and excuses from UN peacekeepers about why these crimes were not being stopped.


Simon continued to work as a reporter for hire for third-string TV outlets, but his career essentially went belly up, while Duck became lead cameraman for the network news broadcasts in New York (working with an anchorman played by the wonderfully pompous James Brolin). When Brolin's character decides to do his broadcast from Bosnia on the five-year anniversary of the war's end, Duck runs into Simon, who claims he is tracking down a major story and needs a cameraman since he's broke and can't hire one. Duck agrees to forgo his vacation in the Greek Isles with the beautiful Joy Bryant to work with Simon, and immediately things begin to take a turn for the worse. Young reporter Benjamin (played by Jesse Eisenberg, as the son of one of a network VP) forces the men to take him along on their adventures through the Serbian mountains in the hopes of scoring an interview with "The Fox," Bosnia's most wanted and protected war criminal. Simon convinces his team that a source has told him exactly where The Fox is hiding, and the worst driving vacation in history begins.


As he did earlier this year in the highly underrated THE HOAX, Richard Gere gives a powerhouse performance as this fractured, once-great reporter who let a personal loss ruin his career. How dare he. And once he lets it slip that maybe an interview isn't his true purpose in finding The Fox, the tension truly escalates. Eisenberg (of The Squid and the Whale) holds his own in the presence of these two great actors as the Harvard grad who thinks his Ivy League education somehow makes him qualified to handle this extremely dangerous mission. But leave it to Terrence Howard to act as our narrator and guide through this insanity (based on an Esquire article by Scott Anderson). He seems to have the most to lose if he goes on this ill-conceived hunt, in which they are mistaken for CIA assassins by nearly everyone they come into contact with. They use this to their advantage at times, including a note-perfect scene in which they meet with an informer (Diane Kruger), who claims she knows the exact location of the The Fox but threatens to withhold the information unless she is paid.


THE HUNTING PARTY is part dark comedy, part thriller, part war movie, part espionage drama, and all the parts work. It reminded me quite a bit of the recent Nicolas Cage film LORD OF WAR, a film about an arms dealer. But Shepard's film is more focused on this one time and place and less about war correspondents, which doesn't mean it's lacking in any way. In the film's opening titles, it says only the most outrageous parts of this story are true, and I don't doubt that for a second. You couldn't make some of this shit up, and that's the heart of the film's beauty. The truth is truly in the details, the nuttiest details you can imagine. THE HUNTING PARTY marks Shepard's second skewed look at the practice of killing, and to put it simply: I like the way this man thinks. He has a real gift for writing smart characters who are put in the most unbelievable circumstances and making it wildly entertaining and worthy of your time and money. This one is a minor masterpiece that may get lost in a crowded September, so seek this baby out.

Capone