OxfordPress.com

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
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Benicio Del Toro, you've just won an Oscar for your supporting role in "Traffic"! What are you going to do next?

He should've gone to Disney World. Instead, after a cameo in "The Pledge," he made "The Hunted," a laughable action-suspense movie co-starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by William Friedkin.

Perhaps Del Toro was attracted by the director, whose movies include "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection." But those films were made about 30 years ago; more recent pictures are "Jade," the David Caruso fiasco, and "Rules of Engagement," which wasted the time and talent of Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.

"The Hunted" opens with Aaron Hallam (Del Toro) in the middle of the mayhem in Kosovo. A crack military assassin, he's discharged with a Silver Star and some serious battle-stress psychoses. The next time we see him, he's in the deep woods outside Portland, hunting down two hunters who "hunt" with enough high-powered artillery to take out North Korea.

Hunting accidents happen all the time, but when the victims are bled, gutted and quartered like deer, the FBI gets interested. They bring in ace tracker L.T. Bonham (Jones), who, before he started working for the Wildlife Fund, trained military assassins. In fact, he trained Hallam.

There are excellent action movies in which accomplished actors spend less time on dialogue and character than firearms and fistfights. Think of "Die Hard," "Air Force One" or "Rambo" (I mean the first "Rambo," not the macho delirium of the sequel). But "The Hunted" is distressingly flaccid. There's more suspense over which star got top billing than over who's going to pummel whom into submission. (Hint: Del Toro kills a very nice overweight African-American cop with a family.)

For me, it got to the point where the only way I could make myself pay attention was by playing Guess That Clip. Here's how it's done: You try to guess which bit of a scene is going to appear on "Regis and Kelly" (usually something slanted older and female); which is going to appear in the trailer (usually slanted young, dumb and male); and which will appear on something middle-of-the-road, like "Today" (usually a combo). Another option: Try to find the scene in which Del Toro fractured his wrist, postponing production for five months.

"The Hunted" does have one very admirable thing going for it. Jones and Del Toro could be the new poster boys for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Their animal attraction (to the beasts, not each other) is lovely, especially in a generic, expensive Hollywood movie like this. But even die-hard animal lovers may have to suppress a laugh when Jones tracks down a wounded wolf whose leg has been caught in a very painful (and possibly illegal) trap. Approaching the animal without so much as a drug dart on him, he tells it to "be still." And it does.