The Hunted
This is Rambo in the Kosovo War, then The Fugitive/Predator, then a proto-Bourne, all in a single package. Mostly Rambo if Richard Crenna was a real character, but the rest of the plot is pretty thin.
The epilogue is really set in Serbia in the turn of the millennium. Milosevic’s thugs are massacring Albanian Muslims, NATO is bombing indiscriminately, but some kind of Seal Team 6 is crawling through the wreckage and killing some Serbian commander, with Slobodan’s picture on the wall.
After an inexplicable cut to a few years later in the Pacific Northwest woods, where some dudes with big spooky rifles are themselves hunted, drawn, and quartered. This triggers the Hoover-Signal and the FBI is on the case.
They don’t have many leads, so they get back to said Richard Crenna character, he’s an external contractor who helps them from time to time. He was pretty cozy up in bumfuck, Canada, saving wolves from traps and facedesking the responsible hunters. Our guy is so comfortable in the freezing cold, but he relents and tracks the killer, one last time.
The hunters were killed in the Oregon woods, so he gets there, tells the hundreds of feds to stand down then goes on alone, and he finds him. After some brawl, the woman in charge comes out of nowhere with the hundreds of feds and they shoot him with a tranquilliser dart. Busted!
Turns out they go way back. Our guy is this expert tracker and trapper, he trained all the top Seal Team 6 dudes into killing efficiently, even though he personally never killed anyone, he even dodged the draft after his brother died in ‘Nam.
This particularly Rambo is well know to our guy, he sent him letters complaining about the psychological toll the missions were taking on him, but our guy dismissed him. He feels guilty for ignoring his surrogate son.
Rambo is debriefed, he is pissed at the government, but externally calm an collected. He was about to spill the beans on all the covert ops he participated in, when some dudes in trenchcoats arrive and take him away into some black site for processing. The feds are enraged, but they have letters from the Attorney General, there’s nothing they can do.
Our guy is getting ready to get back to the cold, might as well flirt with the woman in charge a bit. She doesn’t rebuke him… It was not to be. The trenchcoat guys are idiots, crash their van and get killed by the handcuffed Rambo, he vanishes.
Our boy gets back in the saddle, partnering with the woman in charge. Their best lead is some girlfriend Rambo had nearby. The FBI is particularly realistic in dealing with the public, they lean hard into the poor woman, with veiled threats over her kid. The guy is upstairs, calm, until they bust him and he jumps through a window to avoid gunshots.
He flees in the woman’s car, and the other feds are buffoons and let him get away. After some proto-Bourne chase sequence (in which he slashes the bellows in a tram and slides inside). He hides in some massive construction site and kills two feds before escaping. Eventually he climbs into a bridge and jumps into the water to escape, getting away with the fast current.
The woman in charge snaps and wants blood, our boy mourns another of his potential friends lost to violent thoughts, but hunts Rambo for good this time. Rambo gets into an abandoned factory in the woods and forges a knife from scratch, while our boy decides on a flint cutting stone, Neanderthal style.
The final showdown is near waterfalls, but they don’t jump into the water. They just cut one another pretty bad, until our boy plunges his cutting stone into Rambo’s heart, which costs him dearly.
Our guy gets back into the snow, alone, and burns the letters, doesn’t matter anymore, he is a failure. At least the baby wolf he saved from the snare at the beginning roams free.
The end, repeating that poem about Abraham killing Isaac because God told him to. But this time, God did not held his hand at the last moment.
I like how the cliché about the FBI and CIA butting heads is subverted. Yeah, they struggle, but they are both villains! ACAB, particularly Hoover’s gang, and spooks are no better.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.