The Hunting Party

It’s not often that the complicated Balkans serves as the theatre for a Hollywood film. However, it helps if the conflict is reduced to one man who came to symbolise its massacres, torture and monstrosities — Radovan Karadzic.

In The Hunting Party, he isn’t actually called that, but there is no mistaking who Radoslav Blagdanovic stands for, starting with his shock of white hair and his role in the massacre of Bosnian Muslims. However, having said that, this is an unusual film, exploring what may be among the most dangerous places on earth with trepidation and sans machismo. While at times it may be glib, the film largely sticks to a grim tone of what a war as bitter as that can do to a country.

Its trio of a once-celebrated journalist who had an on-screen meltdown while covering the Balkans, Simon Hunt (Gere); a high-flying television news cameraman, Duck (Howard); and a fresh-out-of-Harvard greenhorn, who finds himself in the hot zone courtesy his TV executive Dad, Benjamin (Eisenberg), are acutely aware of what they are dealing with. And they don’t count their chances very high.

While Hunt wants to capture Blagdanovic a.k.a. The Fox – on the run as one of the world’s most wanted war criminals — for what he did to his Muslim girlfriend as much as for the $5 million bounty on his head, the other two scent a great story and hope for nothing more than an interview. But even that means getting past a formidable array of guards around The Fox who won’t hesitate to kill to keep him safe, and crossing a mountain and a country side where every man is loyal to what Blagdanovic stands for.

As death stalks the three and catches up with them more than once, The Hunting Party tries to raise a few brief questions about the politics that lets one man fend off the entire world’s forces, asking if they actually want to get him. Many of those theories could be true but the film isn’t really about that kind of stuff. And the end is a sellout to what Hollywood demands of its heroes.

Sadly, The Hunting Party is also reaching Indian shores a year after its release. Meanwhile, in July 2008, Karadzic was caught. Far from fearlessly roaming the Bosnian Serb countryside, haunting anyone who came looking for him, he was found hiding as a doctor right in Belgrade, under an assumed identity and with a changed appearance.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com