The Hunting Party is a 2007 American satirical black comedy thriller film, starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Diane Kruger, Jesse Eisenberg and Ljubomir Kerekeš. The working title for this film was Spring Break in Bosnia before being changed to The Hunting Party during post-production.
The Hunting Party had its world premiere at the 64th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2007. The film turned out to be a huge commercial disappointment domestically, grossing only US$969,869 in US theatres.
Plot
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 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' 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 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 the US network television map.
In fall 2000, Duck, now a professional, travels to Sarajevo to a "puff piece" of the network anchor Franklin Harris covering the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, along with the fresh-out-of-Harvard young journalist, and son of the network vice-president, Benjamin. Duck runs into his 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, Simon'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 the 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, 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 film ends, before the closing credits, the screen goes to black and the following message is shown: