The original script by David and Peter Griffiths began with a quotation from Hemingway about hunting humans. The finished film begins much more coolly and, as it turns out, on topic with Johnny Cash quoting Dylan: "God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.'" Then the film opens in full-on Apocalypse Now mode, with Benicio Del Toro's soldier's face barely visible on a black screen lit with reddish light. The wartime flashback is set in Kosovo in 1999, explosions ripping across a screen strewn with corpses and rubble as Serb soldiers massacre Albanian peasants. The scene is surreal in its scope and intensity; its proximity in this cultural moment to bland CNN footage of bombs knocking holes in Baghdad makes clear its status as the fevered stuff of nightmares - over the top even by Hollywood-war-movie standards. These are the hellish visions that languish like unexploded ordinance inside this soldier's head, and Friedkin directs them with a grim and lurid professionalism. Hell of a thing to kill a man.

That point is made clearer in the later flashback sequence that establishes the relationship between the soldier, whose name is Hallam, and his figurative daddy, a drill sergeant - played with twitchy, clipped panache by Tommy Lee Jones - who teaches his men how to filet humans like mad butchers cutting into slabs of meat. Bonham is called in to help by the local cops when a nutso Hallam goes vigilante, tracking and gutting the hunters who head into the woods to nail their prey with expensive rifles and scopes. After a lengthy expository section establishes this backstory even as it puts Hallam into custody and then busts him out again, the bulk of the film depicts only the singleminded pursuit of the student by the teacher, who is pained to confront the bloodthirsty monster that he helped create in what feels to him now like a former life.

That the depictions of hunting seem awfully superficial despite the august advisory presence of author Tom Brown may be the least of the film's problems. The narrative is slapdash and the characters are little more than hoary old archetypes begging for projections of depth from sympathetic audiences. But archetypes can work as content if the film compels on a formal level. Fortunately, The Hunted is put together with an overriding sense of physicality that matches its pulpy subject matter. At its best, it's downright startling. Friedkin's bravura centerpiece has Bonham tracking Hallam through Portland, picking up his trail on city streets and in parks as he resorts to various modes of urban camouflage. This time, we're in Bonham's head - the action is simultaneously silly and thrilling, with Friedkin's framing working your eyeballs so that every edit either reveals another of Hallam's endless getaways or suggests new places the crafty fella could be lurking. Great fun. And I normally deplore movies that climax, predictably, with the two lead characters beating the living crap out of each other, but the knife fight that caps The Hunted is choreographed with breathtaking virtuoso skill - it's so credibly chaotic and surprisingly visceral in its repeated ripping and slashing that I winced at every cut.

What's remarkable about this stuff is not that it's original (original is what it's farthest from) but that much of it feels genuinely chilling, benefitting from Friedkin's generally chilly intensity of purpose. He hands out just enough information to make sense of the situation at hand, and declines to squander much storytelling time fleshing out character motivations. Which is a welcome change of pace, actually. It seems to me that Jones, who admits that he doesn't like to talk about his time in the military while fidgeting awkwardly in front of a window, depicts ambivalence and regret about the legacy he's left to this world as efficiently and with less fuss than he could mouthing more protracted lines of dialogue. The timing of the film's release, surely happenstance but providing unavoidable context, gives it a wee bit of added heft. With cities burning and corpses rotting on all our television screens, the film poses the implicit question of what becomes of the souls of men who are so efficiently indoctrinated by their country in the ways of war. But that's not to say Friedkin, macho to the core, goes peacenik on us, or attempts to provide the answer. So take it or leave it - The Hunted is a satisfying B movie, only as profound as you think it is, but stripped to essentials and built for efficiency.