Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

classicsoncall I'd been waiting for some time to finally catch this on the Encore Western Channel and now that I've seen it I'm sadly underwhelmed. The real Tom Horn was one of the most tragic gunfighters of the Old West, but the story here only deals with the last couple years of his life, just as it's star was sadly winding down his. Steve McQueen has always been one of my favorite TV cowboy and movie action heroes, and it was discomfiting to see him trudge through this role knowing that his end was near from the ravages of mesothelioma.A better film would have had a young McQueen portray the former Army chief of scouts who left home at fourteen to escape an abusive father, live with the Apaches, and later track Geronimo to his eventual capture. As a Pinkerton agent, Horn grew dissatisfied with the legal bureaucracy and became a 'stock detective' capturing rustlers, only to become disillusioned by the corruption of the legal system. As his own man, Tom Horn became judge, jury and executioner, crossing the line from soldier to assassin, placing a rock under his dispatched victims as a personal signature.The events leading to the eventual incarceration and execution of Horn are depicted accurately enough, though I don't know why it was necessary to change the names of the characters. The young boy Jimmy Nolt is a stand-in for William Nickles, the murdered son of a Wyoming sheep rancher. Fans of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" will probably recognize the name of lawman Joe Lafors; it was Lafors who tricked Horn into confessing to the murder of Nickles.Sad as it is to see McQueen go through the motions, I had the sense that he was giving it his all in one of his final pictures. The look on his face as he prepares his character for the gallows seems to presage his own passing in a few short months and you have to wonder how much of that weighed on his mind during the filming of that scene. Personally, I prefer to go with my youthful memories of McQueen as one of my all time favorite characters, that of bounty hunter Josh Randall.

rhinocerosfive-1 This idea must have sounded good over lines and drinks in pre-production.Mostly an uninspired retread of a standard Western formula - "a man of the old west trying to live in the new," as Linda Evans bluntly rasps in one of the awkward love scenes. The wild frontiersman clashing tragically with the very civilization he made possible - this conceit underlay many good Westerns; not much of Hawks or Mann, but some of Ford and Hathaway, most of Eastwood and Penn, and all of Peckinpah. The elements of the formula are durable, and scenery goes a long way. Unfortunately the bad habits William Wiard learned in 70s TV - not a stylistic golden age for the medium - fatally cripple this, perhaps his only bigscreen attempt. Unnecessary zooms and irritating fades dominate the look of the movie, which otherwise suffers from questionable editing, uneven performances, sporadic dialogue, and poor storytelling generally.McQueen was dying, and looks it, and it's perfect for the part. He walks as if he's just been thrown from a saddle, but his hands still work, and his eyes are heavy with experience. He is as good here as he ever was, but as usual, in the scenes where he isn't on a horse or handling some tool (rope, gun, whiskey glass) he is less interesting. This stupid movie locks him in jail for almost half the running time. Denzel Washington had this problem in the nineties, playing a series of crippled or incarcerated leads, a moderate waste in his case but a national crisis with McQueen, who only lives when he's moving. "Papillon" also mostly sucks for this reason. The opening of "The Getaway" is the best prison use of McQueen's restless energy, pressure building up to violence later when he gets sprung. "Tom Horn" takes a wrong dramatic turn when it follows its few action scenes with a long, dull mope behind bars.Tom McGuane, Bud Shrake and Tom Horn himself, channeled through his autobiography, are credited with the story and script; I suspect that most of the good dialogue was McGuane's, but there are issues not usually associated with his writing. Especially atypical of McGuane, his main character's words never betray any kind of... character. Of course, "Bullitt" has a terrible story, and "The Getaway" is just a two-hour chase sequence, and they run fine on the smoke of McQueen's tires, as effectively driven by good directors.So it is, ultimately, Wiard who queers this picture; but sometimes the writing and direction collaborate to offer a really frustrating experience. The scene with Jim Corbett and Horn in the bar is a choice example - it's a Western, for Christ's sake. Show the brawl. Wiard wants an elegy, a la "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" or "Cable Hogue," but Peckinpah learned to direct on "Gunsmoke" and "The Rifleman." Wiard helmed that saccharine standard, "Bonanza," before graduating to "Love, American Style." In the writers' and director's defense, McQueen was a notoriously difficult fellow to work for, and certainly by the last couple of pictures his Solar company was largely dominating his productions. Therefore it is possible that his famous ego was responsible for some of what is wrong with this one. But very few of his movies, after he became a star anyway, are this bad.Richard Farnsworth is cast to type, and Linda Evans performs apparently while suffering from laryngitis. Nobody else is worth mentioning except Elisha Cook Jr and Slim Pickens, both of whom have been in much better company, and several terrified and badly injured horses, who must have had to be shot after making this bad time possible.

bkoganbing Steve McQueen's next to last film was a study of western legend Tom Horn and the last job he took in Wyoming as an enforcer for the big ranchers in 1903.McQueen's real life Tom Horn is in the same dilemma as the fictional John Bernard Books that John Wayne created for The Shootist. He's outlived his time. Still when prosperous rancher Richard Farnsworth for the Cattleman's Association persuades the members to hire Horn to deal with rustlers in Brokeback Mountain country, Horn takes the job because it's what he does.That includes dispensing justice from the barrel of a gun with no regard for due process which was slowly taking hold even in such remote and unsettled places that Wyoming had and still has. He can't do things the way The Virginian did them and get away with it. The Cattlemen's Association with the exception of Farnsworth puts plenty of distance between themselves and Horn.When a 15 year old boy turns up dead, shot with the same kind of rifle Horn uses, on some very flimsy evidence he's arrested. What I found ironic was at the trial apparently judge and lawyers on both sides never heard of the Fifth Amendment and compel Horn's testimony. They didn't offer nor did Horn take the legal provisions against self incrimination. In the end unlike Books in relatively civilized Carson City choosing the manner of his demise, Horn gets hung probably for a crime he didn't commit, but mostly because he was an anachronism in the 20th Century.Steve McQueen turns in a good performance as the aging Horn and such fine players as Linda Evans, Billy Green Bush, Slim Pickens, the aforementioned Richard Farnsworth ably support McQueen. Tom Horn is a fascinating of the man of the frontier who had no place to go and no place to practice his trade, even if that trade was hired gunslinger.

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) I was so shocked by Steve McQueen's death, that I could not see this film during years. Tom Horn is an unusual western, a must for everyone who likes the genre. I must confess though that if I had not read some IMDb user comments and and also used Google to know more about Tom Horn the meaning of the film would have escaped me. It is hard to understand why Tom Horn does not defend himself and help his lawyer, but then this is the whole point of the film. Linda Evans is quite a presence, we don't see enough of her, McQueen has quite a performance in spite of being ill, and Richard Farnsworth and Slim Pickens are always a pleasure to see. It is almost as if the film borrows McQueen's style. Objective,tough, nothing is superfluous.