Rating (4 out of 5)
I flipped over to HBO and one of my old favorites came on, The Fugitive. I hadn’t watched it in quite sometime. As I watched it for the umptenth time, I was impressed at what a quality film this was.
Plot: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) has been wrongly accused of murdering his wife. He is able to escape from prison bus, and as the US Marshals try to apprehend him, he works to find the one armed man who killed his wife. This is a remake of a TV show from the 60′ with the same plot.
What I Liked: No time is wasted. We start out on the bus and the bad inmates hatch a plan to escape, there is action and Richard Kimble escapes along with another inmate. The plot about catching the one-armed man is fed to you along the way.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Samuel Gerard, the US Marshal in charge of getting the inmates back. Tommy Lee makes US Marshals look cool. He takes charge of situations, jokes with his team, makes the right calls on what happens, and in the end is compassionate to Richard Kimble. The interaction between him and his team was actually a really good part of the movie, and added just the right amount of humor to break up action sequences.
While there isn’t a training scene, what they did have was piecing the puzzle together. This can be almost as fun as training. Richard Kimble makes a fake ID for the hospital, so he can infiltrate the prosthetics lab. Then he gets there, finds some clues and he proceeds further.
So the balance between action, humor and sleuthing was well done. It would be tiring watching him run away from the cops all the time. Even though it slowed down for the Sleuthing, it still managed to keep a good pace. At 2 hours and 10 minutes, you know if I am not complaining then it was really good pacing.
I don’t usually mention the musical score, but thought that the score really did well to accentuate the movies scenes and pace.
What I Didn’t Like: There are some scenes where you are wonder if he could have really pulled it off. For example, there is a scene during the St. Patricks day parade. He joins the parade, pulls off the jacket, and then he leaves the parade without his jacket. There is a man in the parade carrying the jacket. People would have asked why is he just now joining, and most likely the guy would have chased after him to get his jacket back.
The last scene where they battle on the rough top, and then in the laundry room. What did the bad guy think he was going to do. Shot the US Marshals and then make a run for it. That part seemed inconsistent.
Conclusion: After watching so many crappy movies lately, to see how a good one is assembled was refreshing. If you like a good on the run movie, this is a good one.
Note: It was fun to see Julianne Moore and Jane Lynch in one of their very early roles.