I Watched The 2003 Movie Sylvester Stallone Says Is Based On First Blood, And Whoa, It's A Wild Ride

Recently, I was watching an interview with Sylvester Stallone where he was looking back on his career. As he was talking about the Rambo franchise, specifically the first movie in the series (and by far the best of the series), First Blood, he mentioned another movie I’d never heard of: The Hunted.

Stallone said that the movie, which you can watch with a Paramount+ subscription, was based on the book First Blood, which his movie from 1982 was also based on. I read it years ago, and I knew a lot had been changed for the movie, so I had to watch The Hunted. It’s a wild movie.

The Hunted Is Packed With Talent

After reading a little about The Hunted, I was surprised that I had never heard of it. It’s loaded with A-list talent. Benicio del Toro plays an elite soldier who has gone nuts, and Tommy Lee Jones, his former instructor, is tasked with bringing the loose cannon in. It co-stars Connie Nielsen, of Gladiator fame, and features some great character actors, including Rex Linn, Mark Pellegrino, and José Zúñiga. Johnny Cash provides a brief intro narration.

The film is directed by the Academy Award-winning William Friedkin, who is most famous for The French Connection and The Exorcist, among many others. It also had a reported budget of over $50 million, which certainly wasn’t chump change in 2003. All things pointed to The Hunted being an underrated classic. Well, all things except the reviews, which were mostly negative. Still, I was ready to dive in.

The Hunted Is A Violent, Crazy Flick, But The Direct Connection To First Blood Isn’t Clear

It also appeared that maybe Stallone wasn’t exactly correct when he said in the interview with GQ that the movie was based on the book. I couldn’t find any evidence that the book First Blood, which was published in 1972, and The Hunted were directly connected. However, plenty of reviews of the movie compared it, mostly negatively, to the book and the Stallone film.

First Blood famously changed quite a bit from its source material, most notably the ending. I won’t spoil it if you’ve never seen it, but let’s just say the book is much more violent and much more tragic in the end than the movie is. It seems to me that The Hunted was very much inspired by the original First Blood book. The plot is that of a rogue soldier hunted by his former mentor (Col. Trautman in First Blood) that ends tragically for everyone. In fact, if I were author David Morrell, who wrote First Blood, I’d have to question if too much was lifted from my story.

In The End, The Hunted Just Isn’t Very Good

I went in with an open mind, ignoring the critics on this one. As the movie went on, however, I got more and more frustrated. I really wanted this to be good, but it just isn’t. The dialogue is cheesy and ham-fisted, the performances are pretty thin, and the direction is lazy. It’s not what I expect from the talent involved. There is so much obvious foreshadowing early in the movie that the third act of the movie was basically spoiled before it even started.

I see now why it carries only a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; it’s not what anyone wants to see from the likes of Friedkin, Jones, and del Toro. At least I can take comfort in the fact that one of the best movies on the 2025 movie schedule, One Battle After Another, features del Toro in a much better performance.