The Greats: The Fugitive

The Greats: “The Fugitive”

USA. 1993. Directed by Andrew Davis. Story by David Twohy. Screenplay by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart. Based on the TV series created by Roy Huggins. Starring: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Julianne Moore and Joe Pantoliano.

Most summer movies try to cover up the fact that they don’t have good stories to tell by having large explosions and car chases, perhaps hoping that numbing the senses will prevent anyone from noticing. “The Fugitive” from 1993 depends on the basics of great storytelling such as character, location and old-fashioned stunt work. The film is filled with memorable action set pieces and they are justly so because they organically grow out of the engrossing plot and the protagonist’s motivation.

The story, based on the cult TV series of the same name, is very simple and Hitchcockian, building on his famous premise of the wronged man who fights to clear his name. A doctor, Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) comes home to find that his wife (Sela Ward) has been brutally murdered by a one-armed man. The murder was executed with such precision, however, to frame Kimble in the crime and he is sentenced to death by lethal injection. When a prison bus transfer goes wrong and results in a crash, however, he makes a narrow, daring escape to freedom.

How he accomplishes this is one of the great action sequences where Kimble leaps out of a bus window in the nick of time before a train collides into it. There is the other famous scene where he stands at the edge of an enormous dam at the end of a pursuit and headlong dives his way into freedom. These sequences work despite their implausibility because they underscore Kimble’s desperation to fight for his life.

At his tail is Deputy Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) who has become one of the great pursuer characters in movie history. Before this film, Jones often played bitter, ruthless villains who would speak vitriolic diatribes to their potential victims before taking them out in a swift. Here he plays a determined man who talks and lives by his reputation to capture his prey and backs every one of his words with action. The brilliance of his performance and the screenplay is how, despite the amount of dialogue he says, he allows his growing realization that Kimble may be innocent to be reflected instead on his momentary pauses and subtle looks of doubt.

The film made Jones a star and also reinvigorated Ford’s career in his best film since “Witness” in 1985. Ford, even in his “Indiana Jones” films, doesn't really play the prototypical action hero like Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is the dogged everyman who is thrust into an extraordinary situation and must use his wits and might to accomplish his goal. In “The Fugitive,” he excels in playing a doctor who gets down, lays low and gets on to business without many words, deserving comparison to Alan Ladd.

The director, Andrew Davis, a Chicago native, uses the city in the best atmospheric way put on film. His camera intercuts the claustrophobic nature of the chase with skyline shots looking down into the streets to highlight the entire city oppressing down on Kimble as he tries to stay free long enough to prove his innocence. His and writers David Twohy and Jen Stuart’s story is also ingenious in the way it makes the logic of the chase consistently believable. Kimble is a step and only a step ahead of Gerard because both are intelligent men – the former, a man who sneakily walks unscathed in all the places he should be avoiding to get the evidence he needs, and the latter, who is almost able to intuit his prey’s next move. Through the chase, the fugitive is able to lead his pursuer to the real villains and prove that he is innocent.

It’s amazing to see how well “The Fugitive” holds up even after all these years. Released back in the summer of 1993, it went on to become a box office hit and then earn several Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and win one for Tommy Lee Jones. It is rare that a summer action thriller gets a Best Picture nod but this film clearly loomed tall in people's minds. To see a movie like this again is simultaneously humbling and saddening simply because intelligent blockbuster films like these are becoming ever so rare in Hollywood.