Key Takeaways
- Plot Overview: A survivalist and his daughter save a woman who is being pursued by a gangster.
- Gibson’s Role: Mel Gibson delivers a dynamic performance as a father with a complex past.
- Film Quality: The movie suffers from rushed production, impacting its overall quality.
- Memorable Scenes: Some action sequences, like a unique dispatching of an enemy, stand out.
PLOT: A reclusive survivalist (Mel Gibson) and his teenage daughter (Sofia Hublitz) take in a young woman (Shelley Hennig) who’s been shot and left for dead—only to discover she’s being hunted by a psychotic gangster (Jordi Mollà) and his cronies.
REVIEW: It’s gotten to the point where I more or less automatically dismiss movies Mel Gibson appears in as an actor. As a director, he’s still pretty much at the top of his game (if we can ignore Flight Risk, that is), but as a movie star he tends to get slotted into the same kind of low-rent B-movies Bruce Willis made in his latter era, usually in small supporting roles. You know the type of films—they’re often called “geezer teasers,” and for the most part aren’t worth watching.
But the downside of this is that it’s hard to tell when Gibson is in a movie as the lead, as he’s always top-billed no matter how small his role is. As such, Hunting Season initially escaped my attention, until word got out that Gibson is actually the lead—and for me, an actioner with Gibson front and center is always worth checking out. Even some of his later-era vehicles, like Blood Father and Get the Gringo, are gems.
Sadly, Hunting Season is no gem, as it suffers from the same issues many of Gibson’s VOD movies have in recent years—namely that the directors, in this case R.J. Collins, have clearly had to make do with such a rushed production schedule, from pre-to-post, that the chances of making a good movie are practically nil. Hunting Season isn’t awful, and Collins does the best he can with the material, but there’s no denying that were Gibson not the star, it would be immediately disposable.
That said, Gibson is still an incredibly dynamic lead. While he doesn’t resemble the young, handsome star he was in his youth, Gibson—with his grizzled look and big bushy beard—still looks cool and carries himself with gravitas. There are flashes of the old Mel, or at least the kind of Mel we’d be getting if he were afforded bigger budgets for his action flicks. He doesn’t phone it in, and making it a father/daughter story was a smart move. You believe Gibson as Bo, a guy with a shady past who’s raising his daughter, Tag (Sofia Hublitz), to be self-sufficient and an expert shot (he buys her a handgun for her birthday). Yet he’s also shown to be loving, supportive, and willing to let her lead her own life—making him unstereotypical for this kind of role. Rather than being overprotective, he teaches her to protect herself.
When the bad guys make the mistake of crossing him, Hunting Season is fun to watch. Too bad it takes about seventy minutes of the ninety-minute running time for things to get really good. There’s too much flat domestic drama, making it hard to invest in or believe Bo’s need to do right by Hennig’s January. Tag mentions Bo was named after a Louis L’Amour character, which makes the quasi-western intent of the movie clear, but it lacks any sense of atmosphere. Jordi Mollà is also way overboard as the psycho baddie, with indulgent monologues that make him come off as more of a bad-guy parody than someone with real menace.
Yet when Gibson gets at it, there are some legitimately cool scenes—such as one where he dispatches a gunman with a lawnmower. That scene alone makes it worth checking out. I just wish Gibson were given the kind of material someone like Liam Neeson still routinely gets. I know he’s out of favor in many circles, but I also think he still has fans who would love to see him in an old-school action flick made with real panache.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter
