Revisiting 'The Fugitive' for Its 30th Anniversary
August 6, 1993 is a notable date for two reasons: It was the 48th anniversary of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and it was the release date for The Fugitive. I was eleven, and distinctly remember seeing the movie with my folks its opening weekend and thinking it was great. I must have also seen it on cable about fifteen-trillion times between the ages of twelve and twenty-two.
I don't remember the last time I watched it before this past weekend, but I don't think I was anywhere near thirty. My memories of it remained positive. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I was expecting a fun action-thriller that would remind me why I love Harrison Ford despite some of his more recent debacles.
Oh well.
The Fugitive doesn't hold up. I mean, it has its bright spots; it's not the worst movie you'll ever see. But on the whole, it has either aged poorly, or - and I suppose this is more likely - I just see its flaws more clearly in my forties than I did in the days before I took cholesterol medication.
Thing is, I think it could have been a way better movie with one not-so-small change: If they'd hired a director who wasn't Andrew Davis. Davis is a journeyman, best-known at the time for directing schlocky action movies starring dudes like Chuck Norris (Code of Silence) and Steven Seagal (Above the Law, Under Siege). I don't much about Davis outside of his work, but he must be one charming motherfucker, because after The Fugitive, he went on to direct another six features, only one of which made money (that would be 2003's Holes, which was based on a best-selling young adult novel and starred a baby-faced Shia LaBeouf). At least one of these films - 1996's Chain Reaction, starring Keanu Reeves - in fact, a very bad rip-off of The Fugitive. He was finally sent to Director Jail after the 2006 Kevin Coster/Ashton Kutcher flop, The Guardian.
So Davis is maybe not a terrible director, but he's not a particularly good one, either. And throughout The Fugitive, he repeatedly makes choices that are tacky and really date the movie and make it kind of irritating to try and sit through. And if you read the script, credited to future B-movie auteur David Twohy (Pitch Black, Below) and Die Hard co-writer Jeb Stuart, none of those things are in there - these are creative choices that Davis made. I don't know that there's any world in which The Fugitive would have been great, but it's very easy to imagine a filmmaker like Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs.) or John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October) making a version of this movie that has aged more gracefully.
The story, for the three of you who don't know, follows Dr. Richard Kimble (Ford), who is sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife (Sela Ward, in a truly thankless role). But through what is more or less sheer luck, Kimble ends up escaping police custody before his execution, at which point he goes on the lam in search of the person who actually killed his wife. Meanwhile, he's being relentlessly pursued by authorities, including U.S. Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones).
And yeah, the script is good, but really only in a very screenwriting-textbook kinda way. Kimble is sympathetic character, but not an interesting one; not only does he lack an arc, but he has no flaws of any sort whatsoever. He's smart, brave, moral, and exceedingly fortunate: Not only does the chance to escape from prison just kinda fall into his lap, but he survives that iconic high dive for no better reason than being #blessed as well. I'm honestly a bit surprised Ford even wanted to play this character - he's neither fun nor cool nor complex. He's beige personified.
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Also... holy moly, do they ever telegraph the identity of the movie's main antagonist, Nichols. He shows up at the beginning of the movie for no discernible reason other than to establish he's someone Kimble knows and to help plant this other doctor as a red herring. Then, later, he gives Kimble some money, and refuses to cooperate with Gerard. So you've got this thoroughly extraneous character who is nothing but kind to our poor, beleaguered hero, and it's like, "That guy did it." Because there's just no other reason for this character to be in the movie. And I recognize that this may be a writing nerd's problem - many, if not most, audience members won't feel like they see this twist coming from a mile away. Still, a better mystery would obviously do a superior job of hiding its Big Bad...
...and, again, there's the Davis of it all. A more-skilled director might have cast someone truly unexpected in the role - an actor not well-known for heel turns, say. But Davis cast Jeroen Krabbé, whose most famous role prior to this was a duplicitous Bond ally-turned-villain - in other words, almost the same exact role he plays here - in 1987's The Living Daylights.
That's really the least of Davis' mistakes, however. His visual style is almost comedically bland. The Fugitive was shot by Michael Chapman - the same guy who shot Taxi Driver and Raging Bull! - and there's not any interesting compositions, camera movements, or even lighting in the whole movie. Chapman is called upon to do nothing a first-year film student couldn't do. It's a total waste of his talents.
Additionally, the movie is structured in such a way that it not-infrequently uses flashbacks and dream sequences for expositional purposes. And I guess Davis was really, really concerned that people might not understand they were watching a flashback or a dream sequence, because he litters these with flash frames scored to percussive claps, and they often end with a key line of dialogue literally echoing in the sound mix. It makes the whole picture feel like a cheesy made-for-T.V. movie, and leaves no doubt that the flick was produced in the late 80s or early 90s.
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Davis' poor choices extend beyond the aesthetic and into the way he conveys narrative information. The whole movie, Kimble is claiming that his wife was murdered by a mysterious one-armed man. For almost half the picture's run time, whenever we see a flashback to that fateful evening, the one-armed man a) is not shown to have one arm, and b) is framed in such a way that his face isn't in the shot. Which suggest that we're supposed to feel ambiguous about Kimble's story, right? We're supposed to suspect that maybe he is guilty? I mean, why the heck else wouldn't you just 100% confirm Kimble's claim from the very first flashback?
But no. About 45 minutes in - during the flashback posted above, which leads to Kimble's decision to go find his wife's killer and prove his innocence - we finally do see that Kimble was telling the truth. And there's no real dramatic reason for this to occur then. Finally seeing the guy's face doesn't bolster Kimble's new course of action in any meaningful way, because there's been no indication that Kimble ever forgot what the guy's face looked like. And, in fact, when we do eventually meet the one-armed man (Andreas Katsulas), we learn that the police questioned him as potential suspect after the murder of Mrs. Kimble, and that he had a solid alibi. There's just no logical cause for holding back this guy's identity.
Gerard is the movie's undeniable bright spot. Part of that is because of the way he's written: Unlike Kimble, he does have an arc (he goes from not caring to caring about whether or not Kimble is innocent), he does have flaws (he makes incorrect assumptions and is less-than-kind to people, including his own allies, as evidenced by the "I don't bargain" sequence), and he does have great dialogue. And his casting is maybe the one thing Davis inarguably nails. It's little wonder that this movie garnered Jones an Oscar and elevated him from being a respected actor to being a household name (I also get why someone thought it was a good idea to base this movie's entire sequel, U.S. Marshals, around his character... although that obviously didn't pan out so well in the end, creatively or financially). Jones not only makes for an top-notch grump, but he has wonderful chemistry with the actors who play the other members of his little squad - particularly the great Joe Pantoliano and Daniel Roebuck.
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The movie's other asset is several brief appearances by notable actors whose careers had not yet quite blossomed. There's Julianne Moore and a nearly-unrecognizable Jane Lynch as doctors, future Lost survivor L. Scott Caldwell, Neil Flynn (Scrubs, The Middle, Mean Girls) as a Transit Cop, and, in the coveted role of 'Training Technician,' the world's least-famous Cusack sibling.
If you have fond memories of The Fugitive and haven't seen it in a long time, my advice would be, leave it that way. I don't think I accomplished much by re-watching this other than buttress my feeling that there's a good reason we don't seek film criticism from eleven-year-olds.