MOVIE REVIEW
“Hunting Elephants”
Grade: C
Starring Sasson Gabai, Moni Moshonov, Patrick Stewart and Gil Blank. Directed by Reshef Levi.
Unrated, with violence, profanity, innuendo. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 48 minutes.
Bottom line: Occasional surprise and over-the-top performances make this worthy
By Roger Moore
Tribune News Service
Patrick Stewart preens, poses and gives us a little song and dance in “Hunting Elephants,” livening up a fairly dark and somewhat predictable Israeli caper comedy.
He plays Lord Michael Simpson, a not-quite-starving actor, a highly born ponce whose stage production “Hamlet: Revenge of the Sith,” has him barely a full step ahead of his creditors.
Then he learns his sister, who married an Israeli, is catatonic and dying in the same retirement home where her hotheaded ex-underground commando husband Eliyahu (Sasson Gabai) protects her from the staff.
“The only person with permission to kill my wife is me!” Eliyahu rages. And since he still wears a holster and sometimes brandishes his pistol, they take him seriously.
Lord Simpson flies to Jerusalem to reclaim the home that their foreign service family owned, which his sister and her husband lived in for decades.
But the situation he stumbles into is what “Hunting Elephants” is actually about. Eliyahu, whose name Lord Simpson butchers in every hilarious way possible (“Elly Hoo Hoo”), is caring for his bullied, estranged grandson (Gil Blank). And like Lord Simpson, like grandson Yonathan, and like his ex-comrade in arms, also retired (Moni Moshonov), Eliyahoo is in desperate need of cash.
Why not rob the bank where Jonathan’s dad ran security until he was worked to an early death? Revenge for the son of the victim, and the victim’s father, Eliyahu — and ready cash for everybody else.
“I’ve never played a bank robber,” Lord Simpson coos. “Is it a big part?”
The set-up, built out of a longish prologue that shows Yonathan’s grief, guilt (he was unable to save his father) and bullying, is uncertain in tone and direction. But the moment Eliyahu and then Lord Simpson show up, Reshef Levi’s film, in English and Hebrew with English subtitles, figures out what it wants to be.
It’s an Israeli “Going in Style,” that American tragi-comedy about geezer bank robbers that the late George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg starred in decades ago.
But in taking his time to get to that plot, Levi gives Gabai a chance to work up a fine lather. There is no cranky old man like a self-righteous “freedom fighter” who still carries a gun. Stewart’s Lord Simpson is not-quite-anti-Semitic, comically dismissive of this nation of “terrorists,” ridiculing the violence, tribalism and bunker mentality of Israeli culture.
Levi packs a lot onto what boils down to a very simple plot, with simple characters with simple motivations. But the occasional surprise and the over-the-top performances make “Hunting Elephants” a somewhat worthy quarry.
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