Hunting Season Review: Mel Gibson Brings Some of His Rugged Intensity to Raja Collins’ Languid Action Thriller
On paper, Hunting Season sounds like a quintessential Mel Gibson action thriller. Or even fit right in Jason Statham’s wheelhouse. The story goes like this: Bowdrie (Gibson) has been living peacefully off the grid with his daughter, Tag (Sofia Hublitz), somewhere in the remote woods of Oklahoma. The earlier stretch of the movie is spent detailing their daily routines from hunting deer to chopping wood, and at one point, Bowdrie prefers to spend frugally by opting to bargain for a second-hand lawnmower from a local pawn shop. But their simple, self-sufficient lifestyle soon takes a turning point when Tag discovers an unconscious, badly bruised young woman on the riverbank.
After Bowdrie finds out about it, he and Tag decide to carry her home and take care of her injury. The woman eventually recovers, and they learn her name is January (Shelley Hennig). She begins to reveal what happened to her and her best friend Lizzie (Scarlet Rose Stallone): They were kidnapped by two masked men working for a ruthless crime boss, Alejandro (Jordi Mollà), who broke into their apartment for a reason connected to a guy named Jensen.
A story like this typically leads to the protagonist being forced to take matters into his own hands, and the fact that casting Mel Gibson in such a role means one would expect plenty of violence and, of course, an eventual all-hell-breaks-loose moment. Director RJ Collins — credited as Raja Collins — adopts a deliberate build-up to the story, taking it slow, which ideally mirrors Bowdrie and Tag’s rural life before the introduction of January changes everything.
Well, at least it should, but Collins’ direction remains erratic. Even when Alejandro’s men finally show up at Bowdrie’s private property, and the latter is getting ready with a loaded gun, the action is short-lived. Or should I say, Collins fails to raise the stakes once the bad guys find out about Bowdrie helping out January. The frustratingly stop-start momentum poses another problem, which results in a languid pace. The showdown is equally disappointing, despite Collins’ attempt to incorporate some visceral action set pieces, but the overall execution doesn’t justify its payoff, especially after all the waiting.
Still, the movie isn’t without its few redeeming factors, beginning with the ominous opening scene revolving around Alejandro looking for someone in the bar and threatening one of the waitresses with a switchblade. Speaking of Alejandro, Jordi Mollà’s violent and sleazy antagonist role instantly reminds me of the one seen in his Johnny Tapia character in Bad Boys II, twenty-two years ago.
Mel Gibson, who leads the movie, does what he can to elevate Bowdrie’s gruff, yet quietly intimidating personality even when the story — credited to Adam Hampton, whose screenwriting works include two television series titled Rough Cut and Play It Loud and a direct-to-DVD, B-movie sci-fi horror The Jurassic Games — undermines his character.
There’s a significant part worth mentioning here — a scene where Gibson channels some of his famous Martin Riggs‘ casually unhinged persona of getting a guy to spill out what he wants to know by tying him to a chair and has a hanging lawnmower placed in front of his face. This proves the 69-year-old Gibson still got it in him, making me wonder this is how an older Riggs would look like if there’s ever the long-gestating Lethal Weapon 5 gets the green light.
The father-daughter dynamic between him and Hublitz’s feisty Tag adds extra weight to the movie’s otherwise half-baked effort. Hunting Season marks the second time this year for Mel Gibson, whose earlier non-starring directing feature resulted in a potential but bumpy airplane thriller, Flight Risk, and now, his competent on-screen acting is hampered by Collins’ sluggish direction.
