Hunting Season Review (2025) - Mel Gibson Still Has It

Hunting Season Review
Release date: Friday, December 5, 2025
Cast: Mel Gibson, Shelley Hennig, Sofia Hublitz, Jordi Molla
Director: RJ Collins
Screenwriter: Adam Hampton
Runtime: 1 hour 33 minutes

There is a particular kind of film that gets made when a genuine movie star enters the later chapters of his career. Call it the elder statesman action picture. Charles Bronson built a second career on them in the eighties. Liam Neeson has been running the same play for fifteen years now. And Mel Gibson, who has been quietly reinventing himself as a weathered antihero for the better part of the last decade, has found a comfortable home in that same territory.

Hunting Season, directed by RJ Collins and set against the rugged backwoods of Oklahoma, is exactly that kind of film. Depending on what you bring to it, that is either a perfectly acceptable Friday night or a disappointment. For me, it landed closer to the former.

Gibson plays Bowdrie, a reclusive survivalist raising his teenage daughter, Tag (Sofia Hublitz), in a cabin well off the grid and well away from whatever his past holds.

The setup is spare and deliberate; Collins takes his time establishing the rhythms of their isolated life before the plot arrives to disrupt it. That disruption comes in the form of January (Shelley Hennig), a badly wounded young woman that Tag pulls from a nearby river. She has been shot, her friend has been murdered, and the people responsible — a criminal outfit led by the vicious Alejandro (Jordi Mollà) — are not far behind. Bowdrie, against his better instincts, decides to protect her.

The rest follows a path that genre fans will recognize within the first twenty minutes.

The script, written by Adam Hampton, is not going to surprise anyone. The plot mechanics are well-worn, and the story moves from point A to point B to point C without much in the way of detour or complication. The villain is menacing enough, but underdeveloped, and there are stretches in the middle act where the film loses momentum before regaining its footing. These are real limitations, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

The thing about Hunting Season is that the cast elevates it in ways the screenplay alone doesn’t earn. Gibson always could make you believe in a character without needing much dialogue to do it, and Bowdrie is a role that plays directly to that strength. He communicates volumes through stillness and economy of movement.

There is a scene early on where Bowdrie sizes up a threat, and the calculation happening behind his eyes tells you everything you need to know about who this man is and what he is capable of. That’s not the script doing that work. That is a performer with forty years of experience making choices that a lesser actor wouldn’t think to make.

Sofia Hublitz deserves just as much recognition here. Her Tag is not a damsel in training, or a plot device, she is a fully realized teen kid navigating a situation that genuinely frightens her, and Hublitz plays that fear and eventual resolve with an authenticity that grounds the whole film.

The father-daughter relationship between Bowdrie and Tag gives Hunting Season its emotional weight, and it works because both performers commit to it completely. Shelley Hennig does solid work in a reactive role, and Jordi Mollà brings adequate menace to Alejandro even if the character needed another draft.

Collins, who steps behind the camera with a confident enough hand for this kind of material, knows how to frame action in a way that feels grounded rather than operatic, and that suits the material. The Oklahoma wilderness does real work as a setting; there is something about wide-open country that makes danger feel more immediate, not less. Bowdrie on his own turf is a different proposition than Bowdrie in a city, and the film understands that.

Hunting Season is not going to make anyone’s year-end list. But dismiss it too quickly and you miss what it actually is: a lean, competent thriller carried across the finish line by a movie star doing what movie stars do. Gibson still has it. That much is not in question.

Hunting Season gets a three out of five: GOOD.