Hunted
U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Aaron Hallam (Benicio del Toro), a former United States clandestine operator, has spent much of his career performing covert assassinations in service to the government. These missions leave the sensitive and intelligent Hallam conflicted and it is implied that he was either set up, or that the government became dissatisfied with the results of his more recent assignments.
In the wilderness of Silver Falls State Park, Oregon, Hallam tracks two deer hunters equipped with expensive scoped rifles. Hallam tells them they are not true hunters and dispatches the two using his knife, and proceeds to ritualistically clean and butcher the bodies.
L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), a civilian instructor of military survival and combat training, is approached and asked to help apprehend Hallam, one of his former students. According to the authorities, Hallam has gone renegade after suffering severe battle stress from his time in the Kosovo War.
Bonham agrees and is assisted in the manhunt by an FBI task force, led by Assistant Special Agent in Charge Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen). Bonham locates Hallam after tracking him and finding his personal effects within a hollow tree trunk deep in the woods. After a blistering hand-to-hand fight, in which the much older Bonham is nearly beaten unconscious, Hallam is captured by the arriving FBI agents.
During interrogation, Hallam expresses a passion for wildlife preservation, much like that of his mentor Bonham. He also mentions military operations in which he had participated; Bonham cuts him off for his own safety. The FBI is unsure of how to treat their would-be murder suspect, and Hallam is soon in the custody of his former Special Forces colleagues, who tell the FBI that Hallam cannot stand trial due to the secret operations he was part of.
While being transported, the operatives indicate that they intend to kill Hallam. However, Hallam manages to kill all the operatives and escape. Alerted to the incident, Bonham and the FBI team track Hallam across the city and back into the wilderness, but Hallam consistently evades them. In the process, he crafts an improvised knife by making a fire and reforging pieces of scrap metal. Realizing that the FBI's tactics aren't working, Bonham strikes out on his own, crafting a knife himself, and the search quickly becomes a personal contest between teacher and student.
In a vicious knife fight beside a waterfall, Bonham is severely wounded but manages to stab Hallam to death with his own knife. The FBI arrives too late, and Bonham walks away without saying a word. Returning to his home in British Columbia, Bonham starts to burn the letters he got from Hallam, in which Hallam expressed his concerns over the things he had done as a government assassin.
murder