The Hunter Movie Review

Steve McQueen's final film wasn't his best. The semi-true story of Ralph "Papa" Thorson, McQueen stars as a modern-day bounty hunter (well, a 1970's bounty hunter anyway) who's stuck in the distant past. In The Hunter, we watch as Thorson cavorts with a series of bail jumping rapscallions, all of them who need reclaimin'.

In a seemingly endless procession of sequences, Thorson captures them all through extraordinary means. Yet he has a pregnant girl waiting for him back home -- so isn't it time he hung all this up and settled down? Well, wouldn't you know it... an angry killer who Thorson has tangled with in the past reappears on the scene, so maybe Thorson's mind will be made up for him!

Even I can't make it sound like anything other than a low-budget thriller suitable for a Sunday matinee on "the Superstation," and that's precisely what The Hunter is. Between the really cheesy special effects and the lame, old-man stunts, the film is a sad epilogue to the star of The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, and Papillon. It would have been totally forgotten had McQueen not died of lung cancer shortly after its completion.

Pathetically enough, Christopher Keane, who wrote the original novel The Hunter back in 1976, just released a follow-up called The Huntress, about, you guessed it, female bounty hunters.