'THE HUNTED' DIRECTOR CUTS RIGHT TO THE CHASE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THERE IS a stripped-down quality to ``The Hunted'' that almost qualifies it as an artistic exercise. But the movie feels more like there are important segments missing from it - and what's left just seems as generic, unnecessarily brutal and under-thought as the film's title.

And it's almost all chase. Again, truth in advertising. But almost to the point of self-parody now for two of the movie's key talents, director William Friedkin (``The French Connection,'' ``To Live and Die in L.A.'') and co-star Tommy Lee Jones (``The Fugitive,'' ``U.S. Marshals,'' ``Double Jeopardy''). Add a backdrop of rogue military dementia and hints of a wider government conspiracy that never amount to anything, and you've got a movie that spends most of its energy juggling action elements we've seen hundreds of times before.

Even Friedkin's efforts to inject a little distinction into the works backfire. Both Jones and the actor who plays his prey, Benicio Del Toro, were trained in a complex Filipino knife-fighting technique, and their encounters are certainly unlike any hand-to-hand combat we're used to seeing in movies. Yet these sequences quickly take on a stylization that comes off as overly choreographed. We're talking about two highly trained assassins here, and this is probably how they would face off against each other. But it looks much more movie than natural, and the illusion of spontaneity remains essential to fight scenes.

Not that this prevents Friedkin from staging some really unappetizing violence. But this ain't ``The Exorcist'' either.

Del Toro plays Aaron Hallam, whom we first meet as an Army Special Forces op taking out a cruel Serbian ethnic cleanser during the Kosovo conflict. We're introduced to L.T. Bonham (Jones) a few years later as he tracks a trap-wounded wolf through snowy British Columbia wilderness. He saves the animal, then finds the trapper and beats him up.

Further south in Oregon, Hallam stalks and kills two over-equipped hunters. Why, we don't know, although there's some evidence that the sportsmen were other than what they seemed (this question remains unexplored). The FBI brings L.T. down to help find the mysterious killer. He goes into the woods bare-handed, telling tough-but-tender federal agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen) that if she doesn't hear back from him in two days, it'll be because he's dead.

The back story goes like this. Though never in the military, L.T. trained many of its best commandos, including Aaron. Guilt over what those boys went on to do drove the teacher into semi-hermitism in the north woods. Moral confusion apparently drove Aaron over the psychotic edge. How either man developed the stamina of Superman is not explained.

We bring this up because, well, it's the closest stuff to depth that the movie provides. Also because the forward momentum of the plot from this point on is all captures, escapes, cornerings and more chases, bookended, pretentiously as it turns out, by Johnny Cash reading the lyrics of Dylan's ``Highway 61 Revisited'' and singing his masterful recent recording, ``The Man Comes Around,'' over the closing credits.

Some of the action is ridiculously spectacular, if rather expertly staged, Friedkin being a past master of kinetic pursuits and the whole thing photographed by the great Caleb Deschanel (``The Black Stallion,'' ``The Right Stuff''). But it's not enough to compensate for ``The Hunted's'' essential hollowness. To borrow my own favorite line from the Dylan song, ``Man, you must be putting me on.''

THE HUNTED - One and one half stars

(R: violence, language)

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Leslie Stefanson.

Director: William Friedkin.

Running time: 1 hr. 34 min.

Playing: Citywide.

In a nutshell: Shaved down to the exposed bone, this chase-and-fight exercise keeps context, characterization and plot to a barely existent minimum. What remains, to borrow Thomas Hobbes' description of life with no arts, is nasty, brutish and short.