The Hunting Party is a 2007 American satirical black comedy thriller film, starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Diane Kruger, Jesse Eisenberg and Ljubomir Kerekeš.
Simon, Duck, and Benjamin are then captured by the Fox's guards and taken to a barn to be executed where axe-wielding Srđan — who has the phrase "умро пре рођења" ("died before birth") tattooed on his forehead in Cyrillic alphabet — is preparing to kill them through torture.
The journalists then release him, with his hands securely bound, in a village called Polje filled with the surviving family members of victims of his war crimes, where he is lynched by the vengeful mob.
[3][4] Published in October 2000 under the title "What I Did on My Summer Vacation",[4] the article talks about a group of five Western war-reporters who reunited in Sarajevo during April 2000 and, over some drinks at a local bar one night, decided to make a half-hearted attempt at catching the accused war criminal and fugitive Radovan Karadžić.
In addition to Anderson, the group consisted of two more Americans, Sebastian Junger and John Falk, as well as Dutchman Harald Doornbos [nl] and Philippe Deprez from Belgium.
Other than alcohol, the starting point for their "manhunt" was an article in local weekly newsmagazine Slobodna Bosna notorious for sensationalist reporting that claimed Karadžić, along with his heavily armed security detail, had been spotted in the village of Čelebići in Republika Srpska (Serbian entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina) near the border with Montenegro.
The journalists decided to play along, and after returning from an uneventful visit to Čelebići, they arranged a meeting with the Serbian secret policeman who, too, was convinced they were a CIA Black Operations team.
He also claimed to have an intimate knowledge of Karadžić's movements and whereabouts, and in return for ratting him out he wanted American passports for himself, his wife, and their four kids, as well as a cut of the bounty prize.
[5] The aggregate consensus states: "The Hunting Party is tonally awkward: its shifts from dark satire to serious political thriller create an uneven film, despite best efforts from its game leads".
"[7] Owen Gleiberman for Entertainment Weekly stated, on the other hand: "What makes The Hunting Party an original, gonzo treat is the way that Shepard plants the movie's tone somewhere between hair-trigger investigative danger and the from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire glee of a Hope/Crosby picture.
[11] The movie didn't fare much better in Croatian cyberspace, as Film.hr's Boško Picula complains: "despite its smooth plot, rounded-off characters, commendable attempts at reaching the virtue of genuineness, and welcome flirting with the absurd, The Hunting Party fails when all of that needs to be put together into a logical unit"[12] while Film-Mag.net's Robert Jukić refers to the overall product as "interestingly conceived, but poorly executed".
[14] The movie was finally released on December 14, 2007, with a premiere showing at Sarajevo's Meeting Point cinema attended by screenwriter Zlatko Topčić, film directors Danis Tanović and Elmir Jukić, as well as politician Bakir Izetbegović, among others.
The premiere was also attended by local actors Miraj Grbić, Snežana Marković, and Semir Krivić, all of whom had minor roles in the movie as Thug #1, Una, and Roadhouse Waiter, respectively.
[17] The reviews in the country's Serb media were generally negative: Nezavisne novine's Davor Pavlović refers to the film as being "poorly directed" and concludes that its main flaws lay in "neither being able to treat the subject matter with sufficient seriousness nor to raise its dramaturgical level above that of a typical Hollywood action movie".
[18] The Hunting Party has been released around the world, premiering in a number of countries in 2007 and 2008: Shepard selected LA-based film composer Rolfe Kent to provide a full orchestral score.