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The Hunting Party

Written and directed by Richard Shepard

Starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Kruger, Joy Bryant, James Brolin and Dylan Baker

Classification: 14A

Rating: ***

A sour, disenchanted war comedy that affects a breezy style, The Hunting Party was originally called Spring Break in Bosnia. The early title captured the mood of the source material, the true story of five war correspondents who reunite in 2000 in a Sarajevo bar. Many drinks later, the quintet hatch a plan to capture indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, butcher of 7,500 Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

As recalled by Scott Anderson in Esquire, the journalists grew dizzy riding a bureaucratic merry-go-round that included not-so-secretive Serbian secret police and a United Nations officer who figured that the pudgy scribblers were a Central Intelligence Agency hit squad. Anderson's conclusion: No one, not the CIA nor the UN nor NATO, wanted Karadzic found.

Of course, there is a difference between magazine stories and movies. Which is why filmmaker Richard Shepard ( The Matador) had the title of his war movie changed to something less glib. Moreover, five pudgy journalists have been replaced by Hollywood stars Richard Gere (his hair now white as a Q-tip) and Terrence Howard.

Still, Shepard has made a movie that is as barbed and irreverent as a press-club bitch session. It is also a good deal wiser. At one point, Howard's character, a cameraman nicknamed Duck, asks Gere's Simon Hunt, a disgraced foreign correspondent, just why he should keep putting his own life in danger.

"Because putting your life in danger is actually living," Hunt replies without enthusiasm.

The Hunting Party does a good job of illustrating Winston Churchill's observation, "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." In another scene, we see the journalists in a car speeding away from a mad sniper. Out of range, finally, they are as happy as kids on the last day of school.

The film is also an example of how Hollywood can improve on a story by embroidering the truth. In real life, the reporters never came close to Karadzic. The Hunting Party gives us the thrill of a chase and an ammonia whiff of danger, and so better explains a war correspondent's addiction to chaos than Anderson's magazine piece could.

Another dramatic invention yields further dividends. Duck and Hunt have a young sidekick, a network executive's son. Benjamin (Jessie Eisenberg) is a valuable storytelling device — an example of rank nepotism who gives his grizzled colleagues cause for comic complaint.

Once befriended, the kid becomes an excuse for Gere's and Howard's characters to tell Benjamin (and us) their favourite war stories. Eisenberg offers a shrewd performance. We understand that two or three wars from now, he will be signing Duck and Hunt's paycheques.

Terrence Howard is also good as the film's narrator.

Happily, the star of the show is indeed the star of the show. Richard Gere, who was terrific in Hoax, playing a compulsive liar with a curious need to tell the truth, here plays a kind of deranged confidence man. And his forlorn, somehow noble hustler Simon Hunt is great fun to watch.

"I'm going to do what every good journalist does when he gets into a new place," Hunt announces, striding past emaciated dogs in the direction of a rickety shed in the village of Celebici.

"What's that?" Benjamin asks.

"Go to the bar."

We're more than glad to follow. The Hunting Party is not without fault. The stars have unnecessary girlfriends, the one sop to genre filmmaking that doesn't work. In addition, no member of the secondary cast, all treacherous bureaucratic officials, pops out at us.

Nevertheless, Richard Shepard's film is a deftly assured work that overflows with sly jokes and change-ups. The fun begins with the names of the lead characters. (Hunt and Duck would seem a good job description for war correspondents.) And the surprises continue to the closing song, a raucous version of the old Bobby Fuller Four song, I Fought the Law, performed in Serbian.

Special to The Globe and Mail