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The Fugitive was released on August 6, 1993 (Wanna feel old? At 25, almost as much time has passed since the movie's release as the 26 years between then and the end of the TV show it was based on). It was universally acclaimed, a major hit, one of the career highpoints for Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, racked up 7 Oscar noms, and with the passage of time you can pretty much call the thing a classic. We had a discussion a while back on here that movies made for adults often don't get the nostalgia treatment decades on, so I was pleasantly surprised at all the recent pieces that have gone up marking the anniverary (like: Hollywood Doesn't Make Movies LIke The Fugitive Anymore). So here's a thread to appreciate Richard Kimble's desperate evasion of authorities and his search for the one-armed man.
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Aug 10, 2018 00:55
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I haven’t watched it since it was released on home video. I suppose I should give it a rewatch. I remember it being solid.
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Aug 10, 2018 02:27
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Julianne Moore was hired to be the romantic lead of the movie but her part was cut down to like 2 minutes of screen time.
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Aug 10, 2018 05:09
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I have a weird issue of having like, face blindness for the third act of The Fugitive. I can remember a lot of it - the discovery of the wife's murder, the escape, the manhunt, Kimble using disguises - but I remember almost nothing about how the movie actually ends.
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Aug 10, 2018 05:39
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I'd been aware of this for years before I watched it because it's one of my dad's (a huge Harrison Ford fan) favourite movies. I only saw it for the first time myself last year and really enjoyed it. There was a craze in the 90s for movie reboots of television series from the 60s and I think this is one of the best (along with Addams Family Values and Mission: Impossible). It's an odd thing for Tommy Lee Jones to have won an Oscar for; never mind not nominating movies like this any more, they don't nominate performances like this any more (see also: Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda).
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Aug 10, 2018 08:13
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Like the original Die Hard, The Fugitive was made in the style of what Joel Silver called "exaggerated reality" - it's unlikely that it could happen in real life (where Kimble would have been killed in the train crash and McClane fallen to his death down the ventilation shaft, if he hadn't been shot before reaching it), but the film was made well enough to let you suspend your disbelief with no trouble. Now, though, the need to keep one-upping what's come before and make the action ever more extreme means that if The Fugitive were made today, it'd probably be as ridiculous as this.
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Aug 10, 2018 10:09
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Fart City posted:I have a weird issue of having like, face blindness for the third act of The Fugitive. I can remember a lot of it - the discovery of the wife's murder, the escape, the manhunt, Kimble using disguises - but I remember almost nothing about how the movie actually ends. Now that you mention it, I have a hard time recalling many details from the ending myself, and I've seen the movie multiple times (granted, each viewing was years apart and the last one was itself years ago). In fact the last time I watched it I specifically remember feeling motivated to because I couldn't recall the ending clearly. It's likely true that the ending is the weakest part of the movie for it to be so unmemorable, but it's also probably mostly due to the fact that for a movie where 90% of the time it's Harrison Ford Vs Tommy Lee Jones it doesn't climax with a face-to-face showdown between them. Also I think the audience thinks of the movie's central mystery not as "who killed his wife" but rather "is it the one-armed man" and so (I guess I'll spoiler tag this just in case anyone youngsters out there haven't seen it) the only seemingly important revelation is that he isn't. And then it gets even more muddled because there's the assassin as well as the guy who hired him so there isn't just one villain to focus on. But yeah, the real meat of the movie is the game of wits between Kimble and Gerard, the whole mystery over who is the real culprit is really secondary, so it makes some sense that the ending doesn stick in our heads.
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Aug 10, 2018 10:36
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The entire thing owing up to 'pharma exec killing to protect profits' was pretty tasty though.
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Aug 10, 2018 18:14
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I rewatched The Fugitive a year or two ago, I think. It was pretty drat good! I'd have to second though that the ending is the least memorable act, but it's not bad by any means.
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Aug 10, 2018 18:30
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Mu Zeta posted:Julianne Moore was hired to be the romantic lead of the movie but her part was cut down to like 2 minutes of screen time. While I love Moore, it was the right decision to make for Kimble's character.
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Aug 10, 2018 19:33
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mobby_6kl posted:I rewatched The Fugitive a year or two ago, I think. It was pretty drat good! I'd have to second though that the ending is the least memorable act, but it's not bad by any means. Ford interrupting that banquet and Joey Pants getting bonked by that sliding metal beam stand out to me, but yeah, the journey is a lot better than the destination.
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Aug 10, 2018 20:12
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I do like how in the final act Nichols just outright assaults Kimble out of sight of the banquet because he's desperate and realizes that he's completely backed into a corner, which also leads to him trying to take on the US Marshals as well. It's a neat juxtaposition of the character who was initially friendly and sympathetic at face value- because he'd been so meticulous with his planning of the murder, he could afford to play the good guy. Then it just falls apart and he really fails to improvise as well as Kimble does.
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Aug 10, 2018 21:27
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Ammanas posted:The entire thing owing up to 'pharma exec killing to protect profits' was pretty tasty though. Not quite, it was "doctor gets massive payout from pharma company to falsify a clinical trial results to get an actually lethal drug approved." Kimble had discovered that the drug was actually causing liver failure, but Nichols was getting paid by Devlin MacGregor, so Nichols orchestrated the murder of the other doctor (Lentz?) and tried to have Kimble killed too. The whole "pharma companies paying doctors to jimmy the results of clinical trials, or giving payouts for prescribing drugs a certain number of times," thing is actually a real, genuine problem in the hosed-up mess that is healthcare in the United States. A semi-recent case was Bextra, which was originally approved by the FDA as an NSAID (like Tylenol, Advil, etc.). Well, Pfizer concealed from the FDA that the way it interacted with the body (I think its metabolization through the liver) could literally cause people to have heart attacks. There wound up being huge lawsuits, people went to jail, etc. Another one was Baycol, which was marketed as a treatment for high cholesterol; Bayer paid out something like a billion dollars in litigation because they had concealed that the drug had a strong possibility of causing kidney failure (I think there were something like more than a hundred thousand deaths ultimately connected to it). Timby fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 21:27
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ElectricSheep posted:I do like how in the final act Nichols just outright assaults Kimble out of sight of the banquet because he's desperate and realizes that he's completely backed into a corner, which also leads to him trying to take on the US Marshals as well. I remember there was a Cracked article from about 10 years ago (if not more) listing the most hilariously mismatched fights in action movies, one of which was Kimble and Nichols in The Fugitive. It speculated that Nichols is shown leaving a squash court when he's confronted by Gerards halfway through the movie because they realised they needed to give him some sort of athletic credibility for when he was sneaking around karate chopping US marshals and breaking chairs over Harrison Ford's head.
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Aug 11, 2018 00:52
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I still would have liked to see Richard Jordan's take on Dr. Nichols. 
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Aug 11, 2018 00:53
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Wheat Loaf posted:I'd been aware of this for years before I watched it because it's one of my dad's (a huge Harrison Ford fan) favourite movies. I only saw it for the first time myself last year and really enjoyed it. There was a craze in the 90s for movie reboots of television series from the 60s and I think this is one of the best (along with Addams Family Values and Mission: Impossible). It's amusing looking back how much cinephiles bitched about TV-to-movie adaptations at the time and how they were the ultimate sign of Hollywood's creative bankruptcy - they were definitely the "reboots" of the 90s. Thing is, all the examples that come to mind all range from good to straight up loving great. Hell, even The Flintstones was pretty decent for what it was. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of truly bad ones but I think that just goes to show how harmless the trend actually was even at its worst.
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Aug 11, 2018 03:34
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The Fugitive was so successful that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_shXM-868Q8
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Aug 11, 2018 03:52
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Jesus, just going by that trailer alone US Marshals was an even bigger shameless retread than I remember. The spoof Wrongfully Accused was referenced upthread, and I always thought it weird how late to the party it was. It just occured to me that its producers might have felt that US Marshals, released earlier that year, would have kept The Fugitive fresh on the public's mind. If that was the case it didn't work on 20-years-ago me, though, cause I was still like "a Fugitive parody now, huh?"
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Aug 11, 2018 04:14
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Neo Rasa posted:The Fugitive was so successful that That's not the trailer for Wrongfully Accused, the actual true sequel to The Fugitive. It exists as part of the greater Nielsonverse. The LNCU, if you will.
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Aug 11, 2018 06:01
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I wondered when someone was going to bring up U.S. Marshals. Poor Newman.  Though he and that pen-gun are the only things I recall of that movie. And RDJ being a pretty effective douche.
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Aug 11, 2018 14:24
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I believe Joey Pantoliano said he was worried about his character being killed because he was hoping he could come back in the sequel, to which Harrison Ford (probably grumpily) responded, "There ain't gonna be a sequel cuz I ain't doin' one!" That bit in the trailer where the voice-over guy's going "NO ONE HAD SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT!" and then it cuts to bored Tommy Lee Jones going, "I have," is funnier than they probably meant it to be.
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Aug 11, 2018 14:32
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My biggest gripe with U.S. Marshals was the fact that once again, they were going after someone who was falsely accused of a crime. We just had that story line in The Fugitive. Why not have them go after someone like a Hannibal Lector type?
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Aug 11, 2018 14:50
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The true measure of the Fugitive's success https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12_EjQKJH98
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Aug 11, 2018 14:54
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drat I wasn't born when this bad boy came out. Never seen it
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Aug 11, 2018 16:52
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Farg posted:drat I wasn't born when this bad boy came out. Never seen it  except I just watched it for the first time last nightI would highly recommend if you like Harrison Ford it's free on Prime if you have a subscription to HBO
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Aug 11, 2018 17:01
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Neo Rasa posted:The Fugitive was so successful that There were a bunch of articles that came out around its release, and then some post-mortems, that talked about what an absolute clusterfuck the making of the movie was. Jones was his prickish self that he is when he's only doing a movie for a paycheck (he was the same way on the Men in Black sequels). Stuart Baird was a second-time director who had absolutely no clue what he was doing. And basically every time RDJ came to the set, he was in no condition to work, having either done a bunch of cocaine or shot up smack in his trailer, which resulted in the rest of the cast absolutely hating him.
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Aug 11, 2018 17:02
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Remember watching this like ten years ago and thinking it was way better that I expected. Glad to see it getting love. US Marshals is so bad.
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Aug 11, 2018 18:54
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James Woods Fan posted:Remember watching this like ten years ago and thinking it was way better that I expected. Glad to see it getting love. US Marshals is so bad. Part of the reason The Fugitive is so great is that it's perfectly edited and doesn't waste a single minute of its running time, and it has some brilliant fakeouts, like when Cosmo walks into the marshals' office and said, "Okay, Sammy, we got him, he's shacked up with a gal in Whiting," you think "oh poo poo," and it turns out they're talking about going to go bust Eddie Bo Smith's character, and then a little later the house where Kimble's staying gets raided and once again you think "oh poo poo," and it turns out they're busting the landlady's son for child porn. The pacing is relentless but every now and again you get a brief moment to breathe, like the "hinky" conversation in the lobby at the Cook County Courthouse, but then it picks up again. It's also perfectly cast, from Ford and Jones to guys like Joey Pants and Daniel Roebuck doing great supporting work, Andreas Katsulas was always a treasure in everything he did, to even the little bit parts like Richard Riehle and his "... he might have got away" after the train crash, and Jeroen Krabbé is just so magnificent (even though, as I said above, I would have liked to see what Richard Jordan would have done with the role). Edit: I've had the Blu-ray sitting unopened on my shelf for over a year. I'm watching it tonight. Timby fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Aug 11, 2018 |
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Aug 11, 2018 19:04
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I remember liking US Marshalls. Everyone in it is an rear end in a top hat, the story is unnecessarily convoluted but the charisma of the cast keeps things moving.
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Aug 12, 2018 02:21
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Ammanas posted:I remember liking US Marshalls. Everyone in it is an rear end in a top hat, the story is unnecessarily convoluted but the charisma of the cast keeps things moving. The interplay between Jones and Pantoliano is the only thing that keeps it moving.
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Aug 12, 2018 02:45
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Doing my promised re-watch, and Jesus, James Newton Howard deserved to have a more prolific career. Dude's score is amazing.
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Aug 12, 2018 02:59
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Mode 7 posted:The true measure of the Fugitive's success Heh, this reminds me that in addition to the ending, the other fuzzy-memory-related reason for my last re-watch of The Fugitive was because I was trying to recall how that signature moment actually went down: I had the impression that, like that Simpsons clip, Jones has Ford cornered at gunpoint at the opening to a dam, Ford pleads, "I didn't kill my wife!", Jones tells him, "I don't care!", and then Ford takes the desperate plunge into the water. Except I knew that couldn't be right, because I could have sworn during the "I don't care" exchange it was Ford who had Jones at gunpoint (and I could recall a very distinct don't-shoot-me facial expression on Jones and his hands in the air when he gives his line), but then again why in the world would Ford jump off a dam if he was the one holding a gun? Of course watching it again cleared up that that these are actually two different scenes that my mind had fused together (they happen very close in proximity during the same set piece, if it helps) and it seems I'm not the only one whose memory performed that mental shortcut. Edit: Wouldn't you know it, just after googling The Fugitive after posting this and the first link I click on starts out with: quote:Don't you hate it when you tell a U.S. Marshal that you didn't kill your wife and all he says is, "I don't care"? It's enough to make you want to jump off a dam. Has some nice trivia, too http://mentalfloss.com/article/87339/13-running-facts-about-fugitive lizardman fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Aug 12, 2018 |
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Aug 12, 2018 03:55
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Man I posted here without actually mentioning anything about The Fugitive itself. I saw that movie in theaters and loved it. I have to agree about the third act though. I think part of why it's not memorable is that the tables have turned enough that the suspense is kind of gone. Especially leading up the the fundraiser/award dinner and stuff, Ford already knows everything, like the movie's kind of spins its wheels a bit waiting for all the major characters to converge in one spot. There's so many moments in the second act where Tommy Lee Jones is extremely dangerous to be around and the pacing is great. Timby posted:James Newton Howard deserved to have a more prolific career. Dude's score is amazing. This and was The Fugitive the first thing to repeatedly use a lot of "we're in a city now" establishing shots where it's a long very very direct overhead pan of a building because that was in every crime procedural type show for like the following decade.
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Aug 12, 2018 20:11
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Here's an amusing piece of awards trivia for The Fugitive. You may be aware that the Edgar Awards are presented to mystery fiction by the Mystery Writers of America. They used to have an award for motion picture screenplays, which were discontinued for some reason about 10 years ago. The Fugitive was nominated in 1994 along with In the Line of Fire and another movie which beat both of them. And that movie (and remember, this is ostensibly for mystery/crime films) was Falling Down. 
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Aug 12, 2018 20:42
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I mean that sort of counts.
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Aug 12, 2018 22:04
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I just like the fact that Alec Baldwin was originally cast as Kimble. Which meant Ford replaced him on two films (Patriot Games and The Fugitive)
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Aug 12, 2018 22:07
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Baldwin is so much less sympathetic, they made a great choice.
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Aug 12, 2018 23:51
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i bet alec baldwin did kill his wife
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Aug 13, 2018 05:30
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Wheat Loaf posted:The Fugitive was nominated in 1994 along with In the Line of Fire and another movie which beat both of them. And that movie (and remember, this is ostensibly for mystery/crime films) was Falling Down. "Sorry we only accept films where the protagonist actually did commit the crime."
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Aug 13, 2018 05:55
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The Fugitive was one of the best casted movies around I remember when it came out I didn't think much about it (never sat down and watched the tv series) so it turning out to be really good was such a fun surprise. The follow up wasn't as good but was still a fun watchable movie (I thought that was RDJ's first clean movie guess i was wrong).
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Aug 13, 2018 08:35
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