Cast: Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg

Director: Richard Shepard

It's not often that the complicated Balkans serves as the theatre for a Hollywood film. However, it helps if the conflict is reduced to one man who came to symbolise its massacres, torture and monstrosities — Radovan Karadzic.

In The Hunting Party, he isn’t actually called that, but there is no mistaking who Radoslav Blagdanovic stands for, starting with his shock of white hair and his role in the massacre of Bosnian Muslims. However, having said that, this is an unusual film, exploring what may be among the most dangerous places on earth with trepidation and sans machismo. While at times it may be glib, the film largely sticks to a grim tone of what a war as bitter as that can do to a country.

Its trio of a once-celebrated journalist who had an on-screen meltdown while covering the Balkans, Simon Hunt (Gere); a high-flying television news cameraman, Duck (Howard); and a fresh-out-of-Harvard greenhorn, who finds himself in the hot zone courtesy his TV executive Dad, Benjamin (Eisenberg), are acutely aware of what they are dealing with. And they don’t count their chances very high.

While Hunt wants to capture Blagdanovic a.k.a. The Fox - on the run as one of the world’s most wanted war criminals — for what he did to his Muslim girlfriend as much as for the $5 million bounty on his head, the other two scent a great story and hope for nothing more than an interview. But even that means getting past a formidable array of guards around The Fox who won’t hesitate to kill to keep him safe, and crossing a mountain and a country side where every man is loyal to what Blagdanovic stands for.

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