Why is Betty Gilpin‘s Hunt character named Crystal? That’s a girly-girl name like Fawn, Tiffany or Serenity, and not a good fit for a tough, quietly seething, physically fearsome character who’s more or less cut from the Clint Eastwood cloth. I found her performance irritating because she’s playing an attitude more than a recognizable human being — an attitude fed by barely controlled anger and not much else.
Crystal is naturally infuriated that Hillary Swank and her wealthy liberal cronies have arranged to hunt a few unlucky deplorables for fun and sport…I get it, of course, who wouldn’t be? But she’s so enraged she can’t be real and basic about it. She’s all twisted up.
It’s satisfying to see Gilpin bring pain and death to these liberal douchebags, but her behavior feels over-calculated. She seems acutely aware of the camera each and every second. Especially when she’s so angry that she hums. And I didn’t think her big womano e womano fight with Swank was anything special either.
I was also hugely annoyed by the resilience of the Hunt characters who are beaten, stabbed and shot within an inch of their lives. No matter what happens they all manage to somehow recover within seconds and rebound back to life, like they’re human tennis balls or something.
I realize that bad action movies began ignoring biological reality decades ago, roughly around the time of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and certainly with the advent of John Woo-styled X-treme violence in late ’80s band early ’90s. The fact is that a severe beating or shooting or stabbing will stop most people in their tracks and leave them moaning on the ground, and that it usually takes hours if not days to recover.
Forgive me for being unable to buy into the bullshit, but that’s what it is.