Movie Review: ‘The Tracker’

by | Aug 10, 2019 | Movie Reviews, Movies | 0 comments

Review by Bradley Smith

The Tracker is an action thriller featuring Dolph Lundgren of Expendables and Rocky fame as a man trying to solve the mystery of his family’s death and maybe take revenge on a few bad guys. There will undoubtably be comparisons to other family revenge thrillers; Peppermint comes to my mind but Taken will probably be more widely used (since the age and gender of the main characters are more similar). On its own, sans the comparisons, The Tracker is moderately well done. The pacing is on the slow side for an alleged action film but maybe not so slow for a mystery.

Dolph Lundgren plays Aiden Hakansson, who we follow from a young child in 1960 hunting with his father to a happily married family man in 2008 to a not-so-happily married man out for revenge in the present. That is a bit of a stretch, because when we meet back up with him in the present day, he doesn’t really start out looking for revenge; he gets brought back into the town and the investigation of his family’s death by an unstable detective that reopened the case before… taking leave. Still, he does get involved some after.

The opening backstory is fascinating, with voiceover from Aiden talking about how his dad taught him the difference between “hunting” and “tracking”. In a nutshell, according to Aiden, hunters track their prey while trackers try to understand their prey. The way Dolph speaks during this monologue is almost poetic and gets the point across well. The closing scene mirrors the opening to add some closure after all is said and done.

There is a side story about the home life of one of the detectives, Antonio Graziani (Italian radio host Marco Mazzoli). Though the point is completely lost on me, there are several scenes with Antonio’s pregnant wife. These scenes do not really add much to the main plot, but there is not too much action to interrupt, so it makes an interesting slice-of-life story.

A partial language barrier exists, since some of the characters speak Italian and there were no subtitles (at least on the screener copy that I viewed). I assumed this was because the stuff they were saying was not important or would be translated by another character (which did happen on occasion), but there were a couple points where it seemed that information was lost in translation.

Overall, it is not a spectacular revenge thriller drama, but nor is it horrible. If you like Dolph Lundgren, this may be worth your time.