The closest parallel here is Tiger King, but the Netflix-style documentary, characterized by the bland drip of information meant to be taken in alongside a phone in your hand, isn’t all that the genre has to offer. What happens when the documentary genre touches grass… it almost becomes a sociopolitical Jackass? Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt is a fun romp following a wide gamut of rationales for “morally righteous hunting” during a single year of the State-sponsored challenge of catching Pythons in the Florida Everglades.
There’s evocative writing to be found in the most degenerate of places; it just requires a thoughtful, has-been adrenaline junkie to capture it with love. Xander Robin finds Toby Benoit, a best-selling novelist and outdoorsman, now helping an old woman achieve her dream of killing a Python, to be his narrator of love of conservation (and conservatism). It’s not incorrect to state that the Burmese Python is an invasive species, and beyond the nihilistic viewpoint of evil begets evil since we’re all on stolen land, which Robin wants to situate us in, the images captured are real – this does harm an ecosystem. Not only the Everglades in Miami-Dade County, but we’ve also now seen satellite populations in Western Charlotte County, all the way to the west of Florida.
It’s material that’s too easy to tokenize for gesturing towards the idea of otherness, maybe even immigration. Sometimes scenes can be as trite as literalizing the reason for us domesticating cats over pythons, being they’re more cuddable, and Robin grounds us in how these reptiles were placed onto the land by exotic marketplaces. But, now what? Moving in circles across 10 mostly uneventful days of python hunting in hopes of a gotcha, ironically, is a POV worth having. The filmmaking is strong enough to carry subtext, thankfully.
The simple brilliance of the whole ordeal is that it shows how the individual ego has been weaponized by higher powers for a sense of purpose, yet it’s also the foundation of community in America. It becomes not quite a showcase of hell, but rather a purgatory of reckoning with our nature. It’s all vibes front to back, but it does feel like the result of frustratingly honest documentation instead of “oh, isn’t this soooo evil lol.”
Rating: 3/5