‘Trophy’ Sundance Review: Brutal Doc Takes Aim at Big-Game Hunting

The South African government called a moratorium on the selling of rhino horns in 2009, after which the illegal poaching of rhinos for their horns skyrocketed.

Chris Moore, a wildlife officer who funds his conservation efforts through money from game hunters, and Christo Gomes, who earns most of his living by catering to American hunters.

Co-directors Shaul Schwarz (“Narco Cultura”) and Christina Clusiau survey a lot of what can only be called ugly Americans here, like a heavy-set woman who talks about wanting to shoot a giraffe and is willing to expand her trophy room for that purpose.

Dr. Craig Packer, an expert on animal conservation, sounds particularly contemptuous when he speaks of the American hunters who take all vestiges of sport away from hunting and make it into something like shopping, bagging their “big” kills in two- or three-day sprees rather than taking any real risks out in the wild.

Hume cannot contain his anger as he sees his rhinos killed by poachers, and the awful irony presented in “Trophy” is that animal-rights activists who don’t fully understand the larger situation are ensuring that some animal species will be destroyed illegally rather than saved legally with the money Hume could make from the rhino horns.

It is only toward the end of the film that Glass moves briefly from being odious to being pathetic as he reveals his vexed relationship with his father, who would stop the car when he was young and make him get out to shoot whatever animals might be near them.

[...] Glass is a man who distrusts the federal government and says he won’t have “bureaucrats” stopping his “right” to kill rare animals.