The Hunt is painfully unfunny, and that's the least of its problems. This is political satire at its absolute laziest: utterly reliant on played out stereotypes, totally irrelevant to real current events, seemingly unaware of any actual conversations taking place in the cultural zeitgeist anywhere besides the realm of Facebook memes, and painstakingly, grimly determined to skewer "both sides" equally--which is bad enough--and failing to even reach that low bar. The movie is completely dreadful.

The film opens with a simple scene: The camera zooms into a phone screen where the members of a group chat discuss "our ratf***er-in-chief" and make references to a mysterious Manor at which they look forward to killing some "deplorables." Cue time jump, and they're airborne, presumably traveling to said Manor, when a groggy southerner stumbles into the main cabin and they're forced to kill him before the festivities even officially begin. Blood spurts from a stab wound in his neck before he gets a stiletto heel to the eye.

Sure, the gore is fun. The Hunt definitely earns its R rating. But beyond that visceral thrill, this movie is truly just baffling. Most of its moderately star-studded cast, including Emma Roberts, Ike Barinholtz, Glenn Howerton, and others, appear in just one or two scenes total, leaving little impression before getting gruesomely killed in such inventive ways as "blown up with a grenade," "shot point-blank," and "arrows." The violence remains shocking up to the end, but not the good kind of shocking. With literally one exception, not a single character sticks around long enough to get any development whatsoever, much less a reason for audiences to care at all what happens to them. Each person is simply a meme-spawned stereotype: yoga pants, Florida man, redneck, neckbeard, and, of course, that extends to "both sides"--the "liberals" are painted as equally quarter-baked clichés.