Fugitive, The (1993)

This feature-length adaptation of the hit mid-1960s television series about a Dr Richard Kimble on the run and trying to prove that he did not kill his wife while relentlessly pursued by an indefatigable police inspector has a couple of major problems. 

Firstly, the idea that Kimble could have been wrongly convicted perhaps made sense in the 1960s or at least was better established in the TV series but given advances since then in a) forensics and investigatory procedures and b) the technical rigour of crime films and TV series that depend on them, the wrongful arrest scenario is implausible. 

Secondly, although Kimble is a vascular surgeon and the milieu of the story is Chicago's upscale medical fraternity, action director Andrew Davis who has previously worked with the likes of Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal saturates the cat-and-mouse chase that was the series' strong-card into a series of action set pieces. Thus it takes nearly an hour of Kimble surviving a bus accident, a train wreck, self-medicating and changing his appearance, escaping a helicopter chase in a stolen ambulance and finally diving from the top of a dam into a river before some semblance of story development appears. The incongruence reaches its apogee in the film's final showdown with two surgeons punching each other's lights out in the roof of the Chicago Hilton before crashing into an elevator shaft to continue their hostilities.

This time around Harrison Ford plays Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones plays Federal Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard  a macho hard-ass who spends most of the film spitting no-nonsense bon mots  at his underlings and anyone who gets in his way.  As most of the film is given to twinning Gerard’s pursuit of Kimble and Kimble’s pursuit of the mysterious one-armed man (Andreas Katsulas) he claims was the real killer, you’ve got to ask why, if Gerard was the hot-shot detective he was supposed to be, he didn’t investigate Kimble’s claim and save the State of Illinois a considerable amount of money chasing a man whom blind Freddy would have realized wasn’t guilty.

The Fugitive was a huge commercial success in an era when A-list actioners were selling like hot-cakes with Ford one of the leading proponents of the style. Surprisingly, it was also a critical success Davis's skill with the action apparently successfully distracting from the mechanical scripting (the only part of the film that stands out is the economically-staged prologue). 

FYI: The film gave a leg up to Tommy Lee Jones who won a Best Supporting Oscar and Julianne Moore who appears briefly as a winsome doctor.

 

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