I kept waiting for The Python Hunt to become the most Florida Man movie ever made.
This marsh-filled documentary takes us to the Everglades for the annual 10-day Florida Python Challenge, when amateur and professional python hunters descend upon the region to round up and kill enough Burmese pythons to win $10,000. This is the Sunshine State’s way of controlling its overpopulation of pythons, which have been chowing down on wildlife ever since Hurricane Andrew sent a reptile importer’s baby-python collection flying all over the area.
I was fully prepared to watch a bunch of brain-dead, danger-seeking yokels have their very own Whacking Day, mistaking this ecosystem-balancing exercise for a bloodsport, possibly injuring each other and themselves in their mission to eradicate some unwelcome foreigners.
However, filmmaker/Floridian Xander Robin (who caught rappers enjoying nature in the HBO reality show Chillin Island) populated his documentary with people who have earnest reasons to sharpen up their machetes. The most environmentally conscious of them is Jimbo, an ousted python hunter who sees this government-sanctioned challenge as the farce/environmental cover-up that it is. (He leaves fake pythons out in the swamp for the unserious “yahoos.”) To him, snakes — both figurative and literal — are ruining the region.
Others are doing it just to accomplish something. Widowed gin-and-tonic-guzzling octogenarian Lynn wants to take one out of its misery before she permanently leaves this place. She teams up with Toby — a veteran guide, newspaper columnist and “eighth-generation Florida cracker” — to take dead-of-night treks all through the ’Glades, getting increasingly grumpy the more she comes up empty.
Most of Hunt features these wannabe snake handlers in the nocturnal thick of it, switching on the lens-flare-inducing lights atop their trucks and going on painfully slow rides up and down the area. (Producer/DJ Nick Leon’s ominous, heavy-lifting score is clearly modeled after the scores Philip Glass has done for Errol Morris docs.) Armed with three single-camera units, Robin catches these seekers from many dramatic angles, turning a real-life journey into a deep, deadpan adventure — a nature documentary for people who drink tallboys and listen to any country singer named Luke.
Robin keeps it all about the hunt, even when it seems there are far more interesting things going on in these people’s lives. We take in some trippy hunting time with Richard, a hipstery science teacher from San Francisco who enjoys microdosing, styling his own facial hair and, quite possibly, polyamory. We also go on a ride-along with Madison, a bong-hitting ex-Marine who leaves her cuckish techbro boyfriend at home to go snake-snatching with studly fellas. Even Jimbo participates in a bar’s python-hunting contest just to hang with his teenage daughter, who used to do a YouTube nature show with Pops.
There are some thrill seekers — we catch a weed-smoking “swamp boy” named Brandon spending an uncomfortable amount of time with a venomous cottonmouth. But Robin focuses more on the people who take it seriously, whether they’re out there for environmental reasons or just to be in the presence of a python before it gets bagged up. It seems obvious that Robin sees this less as a challenge and more as a metaphor for where the hell we’re at now. He proves there are still decent people in DeSantis Country. Unfortunately, the decent ones are drowned out by bloodthirsty folk who’d rather get violent than take the time to learn and understand.
A gnarly coda featuring Floridians publicly dissecting these pesky pythons ultimately reveals who are the real bad guys of this flick. But it’s the sage Toby who — while informing a group of trappers on hunting do’s and don’t’s — lays out The Python Hunt’s pro-humane message even before the snake-chasing starts. “If you ever watch Scooby-Doo,” he tells them, “it always turns out the real monsters are always people.”
