Gonzo Journalists Playing with Fire in Bosnia: "The Hunting Party"

Written and directed by Richard Shepard ("The Matador"), based on an October 2000 Esquire account by Scott Anderson, "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," the movie "The Hunting Party" might be taken as a bitter satire on US/UN/NATO lack of seriousness in capturing and trying for genocide Bosnian Serb leaders. Radovan Karadzic, president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb state who was still at large when the movie was released in 2007 (but now is on trial in the Hague, although he military chief commander Ratko Mladic remains at large, as does the Serbian ethnic cleanser of Croatia, Goran Hadzic). While a fugitive from trial for crimes against humanity, Karadzic published three books in Serbia and maintained a website offering advice (he had medical training and worked at the psychiatric clinic of the main Sarajevo hospital, Kosevo, where he was accused of supplementing his income with psychiatric evaluations to justify early retirements and insanity pleas for crimes...).

The premise of the thriller movie is a simple answer to the question "How can they find the world's most wanted war criminal when the C.I.A, NATO, and the U.N. can't?" or in Shephard's own words: "How was it that five years after the war in Bosnia had ended, men like Karadzic and Mladic were still at large, despite the presence of twenty thousand NATO peacekeeping forces in the country and the professed desire of the United Nations and every Western government to apprehend them?" The answer is that no one prior to the newsmen's return to Sarajevo looked for them. Quoting Shepard again, "For years, NATO governments and the UN had been proclaiming that true peace could never come to Bosnia until fugitive war criminals like Karadzic were caught. At the same time, most had done absolutely nothing to bring that about."

The real-life newsmen were five veterans of Bosnian war/atrocities coverage (one of them Belgian, one Dutch) who mistaken for a CIA hit squad who in a drunken reunion in Sarajevo decided to try to find Karadzic.

Shepard reduced their number to three, a very motley three at that. The instigator of the search is a once star reporter Simon Hunt (a grizzled Richard Gere) who flamed out on live tv from the site of a massacre in Bosnia. The movie is narrated by his former cameraman "Duck" (Terence Howard [Boycott, Hustle and Flow], who cannot quite grow a goatee, but is well-groomed), whose career has prospered as chief cameraman for a network anchor Franklin Harris (James Brolin), but who misses the adrenaline rushes of working with Simon.

Joining them is the son of a network vice-president who just graduated from Harvard and is desperate to prove himself as a real reporter, curly-haired Jesse Eisenberg (from "The Squid and the Whale") playing Benjamin Strauss. The youngster can ask the veterans questions and fill in the audience on the ethnic cleansing by Serbian Bosnians, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and the long siege of Sarajevo targeting civilians. The movie was partly shot in Sarajevo, partly in Croatia, and Croatian atrocities are passed over in silence.

The boys off the bus have some dangerous encounters, most with a tinge of absurdity. A faction that wants "The Fox" (Ljubomir Kerekes) removed from controlling the black market in/to the Republika Srpska mistakes the newsmen for a CIA hit team (headed in the movie by Dylan Baker, who is not amused by the newsmen).

At the start of the movie, the viewer is told that "only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true." The belief that the newsmen were CIA and that the CIA "Black Operations" team that was dispatched in their wake were believed to be fake is one of these ridiculous parts. Another is that the UN police chief did not have a copy of the Karadzic indictment, or a functioning photocopy machine to copy the one the reporters had. Another is that the five-million-dollar reward poster the US produced had an 800 number that only works within the US.

The movie begins with some remembered close calls when Duck and Simon were working together in various shooting wars and includes flashbacks to the scene of a massacre of a Bosnian Muslim town, and Simon's street language (including in the live broadcast that ended his network job five years earlier.

There are perfunctory love interests (one past, one present) for Simon and Duck, but "The Hunting Party" is primarily a buddy picture, with the requisite joking around, and pulling together when the chips are down. I was able to suspend disbelief in Duck's willingness to risk his life again with the madman who regularly endangered his life when both were younger. Simon tells Duck that if one is not risking his life, one is not living, and Terence Howard convinces me that Duck is enough of an adrenaline-junkie to at least half believe this. Since Duck is the narrator, the audience knows that Duck knows how crazy Simon and their hunt are. Benjamin is young and foolish and trying to prove himself man (testosterone supplementing adrenaline...)

Official complicity (malign neglect) is very easy to credit and Karadzic has claimed that he was promised immunity from war crimes prosecution as part of the Dayton accords, one of the possible explanations offered in the movie.

Though not as compelling a characters study as "Salvador" with James Woods as the craziest journalist, I think that "The Hunting Party" is superior to "Welcome to Sarajevo" with Stephan Dillane and Woody Harrelson as the veteran journalists or "Live from Baghdad" with Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham-Carter. I think that Richard Gere is good, but that it is Terrence Howard makes the movie entertaining and credible. Baker, Brolin, Eisenberg and Kerekes have largely stock characters that they play well enough. The music composed by Rolfe Kente (who wrote the "Dexter" theme music and the score for Shepard earlier "The Matador") seemed uninspired to me. The locations provided verisimilitude and cinematographer David Tattersall (who shot the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy and "The Green Mile") used them and the actors well.

The DVD includes a 29-minute discussion of two of the reporters and director Shepard that clarifies what happened (most of the movie's present tense) from Shepard's fiction (the characters of the three newsmen of three different ages and their backstories). I came away believing that "the most ridiculous parts of this story are true" was justified.

For more on the war criminals of the fission of Yugoslavia, see They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavena Drakulic.