The Hunting Party
The film begins with a disclaimer: Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true.
After years of covering one armed conflict after another, American journalist Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) is in Bosnia and Herzegovina in early 1994 reporting on the Bosnian War. In parallel, he has managed to romance a local Muslim girl who is pregnant with his child. However, in the late stages of her pregnancy, she is killed by the Bosnian Serb forces when they overrun her village. Upon seeing the carnage, Simon vows revenge on the Bosnian Serb political leader Dragoslav Bogdanović —known as "The Fox".
Reporting on the gruesome event later that day in a live remote link-up, Simon loses his composure at the network anchor Franklin Harris' (James Brolin) suggestion that the Serb attack may have been a reaction to Muslim provocation attacks from inside the village. As a result of his on-air meltdown, Simon's journalistic career takes a tumble. While his professional prospects spiral downhill, those of his long-time camera man Duck (Terrence Howard) go in the opposite direction. Duck gets a cushy job at the network, while Hunt is left following war after war, as a freelancer, in an attempt to get back on US network television map.
In fall 2000, Duck, now a professional, travels to Sarajevo to shoot a "puff piece" of the network anchor Franklin Harris covering the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, along with fresh-out-of-Harvard young journalist, and son of the network vice-president, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg). Duck runs into old buddy Simon. Once a US network star reporter, Simon is by this point, a desperate half-drunk cynic reduced to filing freelance reports for underfunded news outlets in places like Jamaica and Poland.
All the while, he's looking for a story big enough to propel him back to the realm of credibility. He tells Duck that, through a source, he has located Bogdanović, who is now wanted for war crimes with a US$5 million bounty on his head, and that he'd be interested in trying to score an interview with the fugitive. The Fox is assumed to be in the village of Čelebići in Serbian entity of Bosnia, near the border with Montenegro with various stories circulating about him, such as that he enjoys fox hunting (hence the nickname) and that the head of his security detail is a ruthless psychopath with a tattooed forehead.
Convinced by Simon, Duck comes along to shoot the interview, with Benjamin in tow. On the way, Simon confesses his plan to capture the Fox to collect the bounty — something Duck and Benjamin consider insane even to think about. Along the way, the group is mistaken for a CIA hit squad by several groups, including the United Nations police force and the Serbs themselves; at one point, at the initiative of Benjamin, they claim to be CIA agents themselves, using a threat to avoid paying a fee for a tip. Still, Boris (Mark Ivanir), the local area UN commander, puts them in touch with a woman claiming to have been romantically involved with the Fox's main bodyguard Srđan.
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. At the last moment, a team of CIA assassins, tipped off by Boris, storms the barn and frees the journalists, but Fox escapes. It quickly becomes evident to the journalists that, even in the international community, there are people who do not wish the Fox to be captured.
The CIA orders the journalists to board an airplane bound for the US but they run away to carry out their plan to catch the Fox. They capture him while he is hunting in the woods without his guards. 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.
As the movie ends, before the closing credits, the screen goes to black and the following message is shown:
In theory, the official hunt for war criminals in Bosnia continues to this day...However, the two most wanted men — Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, continue to elude the U.S, The United Nations, The European Union, NATO, The Hague and all in the civilized world who claim to be looking for them. In the ten years that Radovan Karadžić has been on the run, he has published two books and one play Perhaps if the International Community opened a summerstock theatre...But they're probably too busy "searching" for Osama Bin Laden.
Ratko Mladić was arrested on 26 May 2011 and Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade on 21 July 2008 and brought before Belgrade's War Crimes Court a few days later.
The film ends and is then followed by a montage of people and events seen in the movie with words such as 'really existed' flashed across the screen as various characters are shown throughout the film.
revenge, comedy, murder, violence, flashback