There’s something about playing a hustler that frees Richard Gere up as an actor. As Gere has gotten older, a curious thing has happened: whenever he’s called upon to be sincere — as in Autumn in New York or Bee Season — the results are famously deadly. Ask him to play someone untrustworthy, though, — the rogue cop in Internal Affairs, say, or Simon Hunt, the washed-up TV newsman he plays in the new black comedy The Hunting Party  — and he becomes the most dynamic figure on screen.
    Hunt used to be a star reporter, famed for his daredevil reports from international trouble spots, but his career hit the skids after a live on-air meltdown. Now he finds himself in postwar Sarajevo, travelling on his own dime and hoping to make enough money selling whatever footage he can grab to newscasts in Peru and Jamaica to cover the cost of the trip (and all the slivovitz he’ll be drinking along the way).
    When he meets up with Duck (Terrence Howard), his former cameraman, now enjoying a cushy network job, he sees a chance for redemption. He claims to have a lead on the whereabouts of a Serbian general nicknamed “The Fox,” the most wanted war criminal in the entire country. Duck agrees to tag along and, with the son of the network vice-president (Jesse Eisenberg from The Squid and the Whale) in tow, off they head into the hills of Celibici.
    Gere is much too fit and handsome to be convincing as a broke, burnt-out alcoholic, but it’s still lots of fun to watch him blithely bluff his way through one life-threatening scenario after another. He certainly makes up for Howard, who wanders through the movie with a sweater tied around his waist, giving the most boring performance of his career. The sweater has more screen presence than Howard does.
    The Hunting Party was written and directed by Richard Shepard (The Matador), who hopes to do with the Bosnian conflict what Three Kings did with the first Iraq war: tell a funny, shaggy caper story that also makes some hard-hitting points about an international tragedy. He based the script very loosely on an Esquire article by Scott K. Anderson about a group of journalists who embarked on a half-serious mission to capture the fugitive Radovan Karadzic, encountering a colourful gallery of mercenaries, UN soldiers and NATO officials along the way.
    From the opening title card (“Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true”), Shepard attempts to create a rollicking, you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up vibe. Unfortunately, even the film’s craziest real-life details (including a midget gangster and a killer with a sinister tattoo on his face) feel exactly like the kind of thing a Hollywood screenwriter would cook up in order to lend his script some extra punch. Also, the film’s prologue, with its freeze-frames, rock score and detached voice-over narration, gets things off on precisely the wrong foot — Shepard acts as if he’s here to give us the straight dope on Bosnia, but he seems more interested in aping GoodFellas.
    By the way, only the most ridiculous parts of this review are true. Except the crack about Howard’s sweater — that was just a cheap shot.