While this is an enjoyable Film, It suffers from an inability to stick to one fprm: comical with slapstick one moment then deadly serious the next, then filled with action and nonstop violence. It's Steve McQueen's last film, a good one for him, playing a bounty hunter who finds that he is a subject of revenge by someone he won setup who now wants him dead and will stop at nothing when it comes to harassing him before he makes his move. McQueen's a good guy, arresting a twenty-something charming young black man, LeVar Burton, then arranging for his release and hiring him to do chores around the house to give him a new start. Girlfriend Kathryn harrold is pregnant with their child but upset by all the kinds of danger he always ends up in, and wants to leave him after she is confronted by the stalker outside her classroom. Who can blame her with a new baby on the way?

With Eli Wallach as his boss and Tracey Walter as the crazy stalker, there's also Ben Johnson and Richard Venture. Along the way, there are some over the top gay references, a chase in a cornfield with McQueen actually in a large reaping machine chasing them being chased by some criminals, and later, a chase under an elevated Subway in Chicago. Burton is more or less just there for comic relief, being Mr. Fix it and destroying everything he touches.

In spite of the weaknesses and the variety of moods, the film is very entertaining and never slows down at all. Great Chicago locations help as well, and Walter's harassment of Harrold is quite frightening. McQueen does look frail but he gives his all, on the scene all the elevated Subway is filled with excitement especially when McQueen gets on the top of the speeding train car. Pretty formula stuff but definitely a crowd-pleaser that would require a lot of popcorn.

THE HUNTER is a contemporary thriller notable for being Steve McQueen's last role before his untimely death from cancer in 1980. The surprise is that he barely seems to have aged since his days in THE BLOB and he delivers a stylish, cool, and likable performance as always throughout his career. McQueen plays a bail bondsman on the track of various criminal and fugitives who have absconded from the law, and the film's narrative juxtaposes his everyday work with his fraught home life involving a girlfriend with a baby on the way. The film looks and feels a little similar to the DIRTY HARRY series, although it's much more of a character drama. Saying that, it closes out with an extended chase climax through the city which really thrills.

Steve McQueen's farewell performance in The Hunter is a fine action thriller based on the true story of Ralph 'Pappy' Thorsen, bounty hunter and scourge of bail jumpers everywhere or at least those in and around the Chicago area.

It's interesting how the film builds up the level of difficulty of McQueen's cases. His first case was bringing in LeVar Burton who was between the two roles that made his career, in Roots as Kunte Kinte and in Star Trek the Next Generation as Geordi LaForge. The two of them hit it off so well that when Burton's charges are dismissed, he goes to work for McQueen.

The film itself builds up gradually to McQueen's last two cases where the action in the last 25 minutes doesn't let up at all, almost like an Indiana Jones film. There's a fine action sequence involving pursuit on the Chicago Metro and later in a parking lot with McQueen trying to apprehend Thomas Rosales, Jr. who is one real psycho. And then McQueen has to deal with Tracey Walter, a psycho out to kill him who kidnaps McQueens's pregnant girl friend Kathryn Harrold. Walter makes Rosales look like Cary Grant, in fact it was the best psycho act since Steve Ihnat in Madigan.

Always a pleasure in any film is Eli Wallach, reunited with McQueen from one of McQueen's earliest triumphs in The Magnificent Seven. Wallach plays the bail bondsman who hires McQueen's services and is his friend and confidante.

McQueen's last illness came on him with suddenness, though he looks his 50 years, he doesn't look ill in The Hunter. As so he did not get the kind of cinema valedictory that John Wayne did in The Shootist. Still The Hunter is a fine film for a screen legend to go out on.