Movie review: ‘The Hunter’

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Great and legendary actors can do a bad film for any number of reasons. Take dramatic great Al Pacino quite vacuous as the title character in “Bobby Deerfield” (click here for my review) or comedy legend Dan Aykroyd in an execrable turn in “Caddyshack II” (click here for my review). Now, I’ll never understand how a superstar such as Steve McQueen could have ever agreed to do “The Hunter.” It’s a story about a real-life bounty hunter who has a heart. Well, the movie has no heart … or much else. I don’t know (and I’m too lazy to research any gossip of the time) if he did it just for the check, but “The Hunter” stinks from top-to-bottom, side-to-side and up-and-down.

‘The Hunter’
(1980; 97 minutes; rated PG; directed by Buzz Kulick and starring Steve McQueen, Kathryn Harrold and Eli Wallach)

HE’S HUTING FUGITIVES; YOU NEED TO HUNT ANOTHER FLICK

I don’t write long reviews … well, maybe semi-long, but I’m breaking tradition today with a short one. Well, maybe somewhat shorter. It’s about Steve McQueen in “The Hunter.” It was Steve’s final flick before his untimely death at 50 in 1980 following cancer surgery and it’s too bad this stinker had to be last – he died three months after its release.

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Some stars make mistakes; some stars cash a check; and some stars have vanity projects that reek. I don’t believe “The Hunter” falls into any of these categories, but I’ll never understand why McQueen, who might have been headed to an early twilight of a legendary career at the moment, would choose this piece of crap.

The screenplay – based on the life of Ralph “Papa” Thorsen, a bounty hunter with a heart – is an example of how not to write a screenplay; the characters are not just paper-thin, they’re nearly transparent; and the whole thing simply feels like a TV movie with a big budget for action stunts.

The story of “The Hunter” is about McQueen as the bounty hunter who has to be tough when he needs to be, but has a heart of gold. He gives jobs to the fugitives he brings in and lets some live and hang out in his house. At the same time, he’s dealing with having a younger significant other who’s having his baby. He’s not prime fatherhood material. Their relationship on screen is dinner-theater quality and the Lamaze class is really, really bad. And then, to absolutely no one’s surprise, he delivers the baby at the end.

If you make the mistake of watching “The Hunter,” you’ll find it fumbles on every play and some of it is embarrassing to the actors doing the work. The only watchable moments are two chase scenes – one with McQueen chasing two guys at a farm (dynamite is involved) and the big one that includes a memorable ride on an elevated train in Chicago (and seeing a car plunge 10 stories or so into the Chicago River).

All-in-all, “The Hunter” had a chance. But not the way it turned out.  None of the acting stands out and you’re looking for the “fast forward” faster than characters call McQueen “Papa” I this one. Ah well, a target missed and a terrible flick.

Here’s a quick look at some of the actors …

  • Don’t judge McQueen by this film. You’ll find his absolute best acting in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Getaway” with wife-to-be Ali MacGraw (click here for my review). Otherwise, revisit his great films including “The Great Escape” (click here for my review), “The Cincinnati Kid” (click here for my review) and, of course, his signature car-chase cop film “Bullitt” (click here for my review).
  • Kathryn Harrold plays Thorson’s significant other “Dotty” and she is simply terrible. But, then again, you can’t blame her. All her scenes are contrived and it’s just awful to watch. She was better in an equally bad HBO film about golf called “Dead Solid Perfect” and she hasn’t had an acting credit since 2011, but I doubt it’s because of “The Hunter.”
  • A Golden Globe nominee (obviously not for this one), Eli Wallach is in only a few scenes and therefore manages to keep his screen time to a minimum. Thanks, Eli! You’ll find much better from this prolific method actor from spaghetti westerns (“The Good the Bad and the Ugly”) to “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” He was nominated for “Baby Doll;” won a Primetime Emmy and was nominated for four others; and he died at 98 in 2014.
  • A three-time Primetime Emmy nominee, LeVar Burton plays “Tommy Price” and you unfortunately never find out exactly why McQueen takes a liking to him (other than LeVar’s character is unlike toughened criminals). The part was written into the film at McQueen’s request after seeing some of LeVar’s work. So, don’t hold “The Hunter” against Burton, either. You’ll remember him best from the legendary TV mini-series “Roots” as well as the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

After them … well, there’s not much to watch, much less write about. You never get any real idea what motivated the main character to do what he does and it’s as if the whole film is kind of a slow-motion dream poorly executed for the big screen. Heck, they sadly had McQueen, whose legendary chase scene in “Bullitt” made Mustang fastbacks even more iconic, in a black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am just like Burt Reynolds’ ride in “Smokey and the Bandit” (click here for my review) … and that’s just pathetic.

The person at the helm of this mess is Buzz Kulick, a director with mostly TV credits and some work in film. Basically, Kulick should have stayed with TV and not embarrassed himself and solid actors such as McQueen, Harrold, Wallach and even Burton. I’m not going to spend any more time on Kulick, who died at 76 in 1999 of heart failure.

I was pleased when I saw “The Hunter” was going to be on a movie channel, but then totally dismayed when I watched it again and realized that I should have remembered how bad it turned out.

Steve deserved much better than to have this his last film. Ah well, you can’t change history.

“The Hunter” was the 43rd ranked film at U.S. theaters in 1980 with $16.2 million, according to Box Office Mojo. It came in ahead of the better-acted effort by McQueen with the very solid western “Tom Horn” (I can’t find it listed either on lists compiled by Box Office Mojo or IMDb.com, but both report it earned between $8 million and $9 million for somewhere around 57th place).

The year of 1980 was outstanding in cinema from the No. 1 film (naturally) in “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” with $209.3 million, which nearly doubled the No. 2 film “9 to 5” (click here for my review) with its $103.2 million. You found many great and memorable flicks that year from “The Shining,” “Airplane!,” “The Blues Brothers” and the golf classic “Caddyshack.” Also, you found overrated treacle such as “Ordinary People” from Robert Redford and drivel from Brooke Shields in “The Blue Lagoon.” Here are the other films from 1980 that I’ve reviewed:

Assorted cast and film notes (via IMDb.com):

  • McQueen was diagnosed with cancer a month after filming ended.
  • Lee Marvin was considered for the role that McQueen took. Hmmm, so the film could have been even worse.
  • Directly from IMDb.com: “The actual 1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe convertible Steve McQueen drove in this film sold for $84,000 in an auction in 2013.”
  • McQueen and Wallach had only previously worked together 20 years earlier on the original “The Magnificent Seven.”
  • The real “Papa” Thorson was reportedly killed by a car bomb in the 1990s. I write “reportedly” because I could find no definitive obituary. The book on which the film is based is sometimes called a novel and other times called a biography and the basis for the movie and so there’s a lot of speculation about the truth with Thorson’s life. Elsewhere, others repeat the car bomb story, while others write he died of natural causes. His wife wrote her own story glorifying herself and “Papa” and a movie was made of it. Still, there’s no reliable source showing Thorson’s cause of death.
  • Finally and directly from IMDb.com: “When Steve McQueen arrived at one of locations used for the film, he was checked into a really nice hotel with all the amenities available at the time. When he found out that the crew was staying in a cheaper motel nearby, he checked out of the hotel and stayed in the motel with the crew.”

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