Are people seriously arguing that "The Hunt" is biased against "the deplorables"?

I’m only going by the trailer in insisting that it’s not but that’s more than most of its critics seem to be going on. This passage from THR’s write-up of the movie, whose ads were pulled after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, is making the rounds:

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In the wake of a trio of deadly massacres, the studio is evaluating its strategy for the R-rated Blumhouse satire in which elites stalk “deplorables.”

“Did anyone see what our ratf***er-in-chief just did?” one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: “At least The Hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”

That was enough to justify an entire segment on Laura Ingraham’s show last night, notes Alex Griswold, with her guest calling for the film to be shelved.

Was Fox so hard-up for a culture-war grievance that they had to invent one from a movie that’s clearly aimed at red-state audiences?

Watch for yourself. This is a way-way-way over-the-top populist revenge fantasy, in which working-class people are treated like animals (literally) by the rich but heroically fight back. It’s a reboot of “The Most Dangerous Game” aimed at America’s cultural divide, with evil elite Hilary Swank hunting average joes for sport. If “the deplorables” are being satirized here, it’s only by virtue of how extreme the movie is in flattering their sensibilities: “Let’s write a script in which we bring to life MAGA Nation’s most cartoonishly paranoid, villainous stereotypes of the upper class and see how much money we can make off them at the box office.”

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That might be the only way to explain how you get a line as laughable as “Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.” It’s basically “Pizzagate: The Movie,” with a hunting ring subbed in for a pedophile ring.

If righties want to object it, at least object to it on those grounds. “They’re mocking our justifiable grievances against the ruling class by reducing that class to a caricature,” not “They want to see us dead.”

Sheesh. Here’s the trailer, followed by Dartmouth grad Laura Ingraham pretending not to grasp what she’s watching.


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