"The Hunting Party" makes a forgettable contribution to all those movies about tormented, gonzo newsmen, stranded in some hellish outpost (in this case, Bosnia), who drink to drown those terrible memories but are committed to news, news, news.

Richard Gere plays Simon, a freelance TV news reporter who's burnt out by traumatic memories in Bosnia but has returned five years later to get the biggest scoop-and-coup of his career: finding and interviewing "the Fox" himself, a Serbian (and fictional) strongman who was behind the systematic slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the war. Re-teaming with Duck (Terrence Howard), his old news buddy and cameraman, Simon ventures into the Fox's well-protected lair.

Writer-director Richard Shepard (see Film Notes on Page 42), whose 2005 film "The Matador" gave Pierce Brosnan a chance to de-Bond and show he could play fat and sleazy, seems determined to reprise every cliche and stereotype in the book, including back-slapping, been-to-hell-and-back journalists, psychotic locals who drink hard and spit far, and bumbling U.N. officials. Shepard, perhaps realizing he needs to undercut his hackneyed pretensions, tries to add a semi-comic touch. But his efforts -- most notably, casting Jesse Eisenberg as a hyper-jittery rookie journalist who tags along with the two men -- fall flat and make the movie even more uneven. And no amount of intentional comedy can escape this unintentional howler, coming from Simon as he justifies his dangerous mission: "This is actual living; the rest is television." Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.

-- Desson Thomson (Sept. 28, 2007)

Contains violence and profanity.