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'The Hunting Party'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

September 7, 2007

Is anyone ready for a wry action comedy surrounding the bungled search for Osama bin Laden? It's doubtful, but writer/director Richard Shepard thinks there is something risibly absurd in the seeming inability of global intelligence agencies to ferret out high-profile international criminals hiding in plain sight.

In order to make his point, Shepard has turned his attention toward a defunct conflict and a neglected war criminal. In "The Hunting Party," three journalists go on the prowl for a fictionalized version of the still-missing Serbian commander Radovan Karadzic. As retooled from a real-life incident into a ragtag buddy picture, it redefines the notion of guilty pleasure (which usually connotes so-bad-it's-fun). "The Hunting Party" is a smart and tense diversion, albeit in a vaguely irresponsible way.

Based on an Esquire report about five journalists who embarked on a search for Karadzic, "The Hunting Party" stars Richard Gere as Simon Hunt (wink wink), a dissolute war correspondent who talks his successful ex-cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) into helping him stalk an elusive Serbian monster known as The Fox. Duck brings along a television exec's wet-nosed son, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), who squawks about journalistic ethics and flashes his Harvard credentials whenever anyone questions his experience.

The journalists are alternately hindered and helped by mistaken identity: Everyone seems to think they are working for the CIA, including a local UN official who puts them on The Fox's trail. As the trio burrows into densely Serbian regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and meets resistance from the fish-eyed villagers, the film takes on the weird hybrid aura of a "Dracula" picture cross-hatched with a politically sensitive buddy comedy.

Gere, Howard and Eisenberg work up an appealingly fractious energy together, although one can't help but feel that "The Hunting Party" would have had more street cred had Shepard opted to dramatize the characters' five real-life prototypes, rather than boil them down and juice them up. As it is, the horrors of the Serbian-Bosnian war feel shortchanged by the trio's cloak-and-dagger monkey business, as does the seeming high-mindedness of their mission. What are we supposed to feel when it is revealed that driving Hunt's Ahab-like monomania to track down a mass murderer is an affair of the heart? Pretty bummed, I would say.

THE HUNTING PARTY (R). Richard Gere, Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg are a motley crew of American journalists who set out to corner a Serbian war criminal. Richard Shepard's dark comedy is tense and intermittently amusing, if a bit questionable in its tactics. 1:43 (language, adult situations). At AMC Loews Lincoln Center 13, Manhattan.