A computer-chip salesman walks into a bar. We’ll call him Paul. He’s a New Yorker in Tokyo for business, but now it’s time for pleasure, so he sidles up beside a pretty local girl and starts chatting her up. She drinks too much sake and he offers to take her to dinner and a drum concert. Later that night, he walks her back to her hotel room like a gentleman and starts to leave. But she tells him to stay, so he does. She strips him down to his boxers, which have pictures of “piggies” on them. But she has steamy sex with him, anyway, right there in the room’s built-in hot tub. After orgasm, she’s decapitated by a ninja. I guess that’s the punch line.
Whatever the case, it’s certainly the setup for The Hunted, arguably the American major studios’ final attempt at turning Highlander‘s Christopher Lambert into a bona fide action star. His Paul is unable to save his bedroom conquest (Joan Chen, TV’s Twin Peaks) from having her head separated from the torso, but he’s lucky to survive himself, after having his skin penetrated by a poison-tipped shuriken.
For witnessing the murder and living to tell the cops about it, Paul is targeted by Kinjo the killer ninja (John Lone, The Shadow), who belongs to a ninja cult. With the help of descendants of a samurai family (9 Souls‘ Yoshio Harada and Shogun‘s Yôko Shimada), Paul in turn sets his sights on Kinjo, thereby proving the adage true: The hunter indeed becomes The Hunted.
“You’ve seen too many samurai movies,” a detective tells Paul just prior to taking a ninja arrow through the larynx, and certainly J.F. Lawton has seen plenty of them, too. Clearly, the writer/director (Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) enjoyed marrying the worlds of the Far East and the far-fetched Hollywood actioner; it shows most in two slick set pieces: a hospital siege and a swords-a-slingin’ scuffle aboard a moving bullet train. That doesn’t mean the whole is an exciting one, however; only in bits and pieces does The Hunted live up to Lawton’s own standards. That said, Lambert can claim it as one of his best. —Rod Lott