Let's be realistic.

Good concept, poorly executed.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There are things I liked about Iranian drama 'The Hunted': the scenes of quiet dialogue, where the meaning lies in what's not said, or the surreal waiting-for-Godot quality that the movie takes on as it nears its end. It's also interesting to see an Iran of stormy coasts and rain-swept forests, far from the classical image of a land of deserts. But the first half of the film is overly quiet and slow, and there are also a number of low-key scenes that have self-evidently been written and shot that way not for effect, but for budgetary reasons: the car chase, for example, is supremely low-energy, while other critical moments occur off-camera. More than anything else, however, the film is let down mostly by its odd plot, and the seemingly random motivations of its characters. It feels like the debut feature of someone with more than a few ideas, but without the practice of how to actually make them work as a film.

Ali is an ex-convict who on release from prison returns home to the city of Tehran. Reconnecting his fragmented family of wife and daughter, he finds a job working night shifts to provide. Tehran, depicted as an urban jungle fraught with dissent and unrest, becomes like a 'prison' to Ali, and he manages to hold on to his sanity by going away to the forest North of the city, as often as he can, to hunt.One day Ali's wife and daughter go missing. After a tense and lengthy procedure to try and locate them, he learns from the Police that they have been killed in the cross-fire of a city gun fight between Police officers and an Insurgent group. There is an ambiguity surrounding Ali's wife and daughter; around their origin (is she really his daughter); and concerning their ultimate fates.Ali almost breaks but manages to retain some sense of his sanity by instead breaking from the state. He takes his hunting rifle and staking out a highway road from a hill top, he kills two random police officers. He leaves Tehran and goes on the run only to be tracked by a police helicopter which eventually leads to a high speed car chase when his car is spotted on a foggy mountain road by a patrol-car. Captured by two policemen after a deep forest pursuit, the three of them find themselves lost. Wandering in frustration through dense mountain forest, their is a shift in the dynamics between the Policemen and Ali, and a deadly conflict between the two officers gradually surfaces.It is a striking and tense, emotional thriller with long periods (sequence after sequence beautifully shot) absent of dialogue which makes the film all the more fully engaging.

This review was made following a screening at Cambridge Film Festival (September 2010):This film runs to 92 minutes, and, for me, achieves much more than it has been given credit for here without squandering resources, the main one being the enigmatic lead portrayal of hunter.Ignoring whether this is mere photography (a dissatisfaction better founded, say, as a response to Jarman's experimental films?), it is a moody film, and it takes time, deliberately, to establish moods. Although I several times predicted where it was going, it still disrupts and undermines our notions of where it fits into our typology of films (as the festival write-up indicated).Say that there is no plot overlooks the significance of the whole trajectory, and fails to relate later events to earlier ones: obviously, I cannot spell it out, but, to understand it, it is important to pay attention to what is said to the hunter in the woods. That information explains his earlier actions, which seemed motiveless (or arising from some nihilistic and sleep-depriving reactive despair), but which turn out to build on events that we have not been shown.Knowing, at this point, what he has done, we can maybe guess why: we were given detail earlier about his daughter that had been kept from him, but which he might have uncovered, and could have made him see his family life differently. Or he might have had some extreme and pathological reaction to the conditions of his existence.We already knew something about his past, and can soon see that he has something of the stamp of a loner that is seen in TAXI-DRIVER, content to drive around in his car and wait for first light to hunt. These are important elements in both films, and I was soon reminded of this one's older brother.Dialogue is sparing in both films, and they share the desire for revenge that comes over characters at what cannot be tolerated in someone else's behaviour. That, coupled with the recurrent impulse here to implicate others, is at the heart of this film.It is one of quiet scenes into which sudden loud noises tear and where threat and intimidation inject, by the nature of their origin, onward twists that lead to the final scene and complete what, for me, is a very definite structure. That being said, if one expected this film to spill its explanation into one's lap, it will remain tightly closed as a story-book, and seem to have taken the viewer nowhere.I rate this film highly, but there is one niggle to do with how the ending is set up, with our three figures in isolation (and a good misdirection that others will be on the scene): the hunter is given something by one man, but, irrespective of whether it was his own, it would not only have been traceable to him, but his fingerprints would also have been inexplicably all over it. In those terms, unless I have misunderstood the closing shot, I do not see that it worked as intended.

This movie played at the International Film Festival in Berlin this year and it was in the official program/selection! A drama about a family living in a very disturbing time and regime. But don't expect the movie to give you some easy answers or an easy plot to follow. This is a difficult film, but that's the way they should be (with a theme like that).Of course you could argue, that the ending isn't the one you would imagine, but hopefully the movie has gotten to you until this point, so that you can identify with the persons at some basic level. I liked it and I think it has some very interesting questions (that again won't be answered in the movie). Not an easy movie then, but if that's your cup of tea, you will be very pleased here