Review: Night Hunter’s Actors Are Helpless Against Its Nonsensical Clichés

The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

Night Hunter
Photo: Saban Films

David Raymond’s Night Hunter harks back to ’90s American cinema, when evil masterminds were having a moment in the wake of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s Se7en. At this time, serial killers on film weren’t merely clever, sick white men; they were rock stars as well as masters of all forms of social bureaucracy, possessing brilliant psychological insight into their prey. None of these films were made with Demme and Fincher’s respective humanity and panache, but a handful featured memorable acting. Edward Norton gave an electric performance as a murder suspect in Gregory Hoblit’s Primal Fear, and Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter informed Jon Amiel’s Copycat with a soulfulness that almost felt obscene considering the flimsiness of the material. The DNA of these films runs explicitly through Night Hunter, a film so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

Marshall (Henry Cavill) is a hunky cop who split from his wife because, in the tradition of many film detectives before him, he simply cares too damn much about catching psychos. His almost-teenage daughter, Faye (Emma Tremblay), attempts to puncture her father’s aloofness, speaking to him like an adult caseworker, encouraging him to open up about himself. In one surprisingly poignant scene, we’re allowed to almost casually notice that Faye has set up her father’s spare bachelor pad from hell while he’s off hunting the killer du jour. Faye is no more believable than any of the other stereotypes inhabiting Night Hunter, but Tremblay is the one actor here who informs her role with human conviction. (Also, you may respect Raymond’s restraint for not setting Faye up as a target of one of Marshall’s nemeses.)

Cavill isn’t so much bad in his role as he isn’t present, which is understandable given that Marshall has been written with even less personality than usual for the hero of a cops-and-pervs narrative. The actor seems to want to underplay the role, but he doesn’t communicate a sense of something simmering beneath Marshall’s stoic man’s-man exterior—a quality that Cavill achieved in his underrated performances as Superman. And so what’s left is a man walking through a role, trying to deliver third-rate dialogue with an illusion of urgency. As an ex-judge turned vigilante hunter of sexual predators (no joke), Ben Kinglsey is on the same erudite, I-know-I’m-classing-up-this-joint autopilot that characterizes many of his performances in VOD schlock, as is Stanley Tucci as Marshall’s superior. Alexandra Daddario tries to bring her criminal profiler to life, but the character is compendium of plot devices, a fountain of exposition who morphs into a damsel in distress and finally a love interest.

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One actor does aim for the back rows in Night Hunter, and his performance is a disaster. As Simon, Brendan Fletcher is required to operate in two alternating modes: as a mewling, slobbering, almost incomprehensible adult baby, and as a spittle-firing psychopath, a killer of women with the resources of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Simon is also clearly derived from Norton’s role in Primal Fear, and from a handful of James McAvoy’s roles in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, but Fletcher doesn’t have those actors’ self-preserving instincts. Norton and McAvoy knew they were playing shtick, and their knowledge parallels the showboating of the characters, allowing the audience to feel in on the joke. By contrast, Fletcher appears to take his character dead seriously, obsessively doubling down on Simon’s grotesquerie and making a spectacle of himself. And Raymond’s screenplay, a nonsensical hodgepodge of gimmicks—there’s even a cracking frozen pond and a dark, dark patch of woods—increasingly leaves Fletcher out to dry by inciting him to go further and further over the top. He may be playing the villain, but Fletcher feels like Night Hunter’s sacrificial lamb.

Score: 
 Cast: Henry Cavill, Alexandra Daddario, Minka Kelly, Stanley Tucci, Ben Kingsley, Emma Tremblay, Nathan Fillion, Eliana Jones, Carlyn Burchell  Director: David Raymond  Screenwriter: David Raymond  Distributor: Saban Films  Running Time: 98 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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