Mr-Fusion
Back in '98, I'd gone to see "U.S. Marshals" with my dad while Mom went to see "L.A. Confidential"; and for years, I though she'd gotten the better end of the deal.That's still true today, but I found myself engaged from beginning to end. It's not great, especially if you hold it up against the first movie - and Downey's character is the worst - but Stuart Baird keeps things moving and it's a decent police procedural. Unnecessary sequel? Sure, but you could do a lot worse.
FlashCallahan
When a prisoner transport plane carrying Oscar winning Deputy Sam Gerard as an escort crashes, one prisoner, Mark Sheridan helps him rescue some trapped prisoners and then escapes.Gerard and his team of start their pursuit, but the simple fugitive situation soon gets more complicated when Gerard learns that Sheridan is no mere criminal.At the same time, Mark Sheridan is out to find out the truth himself while keeping one step ahead of Gerard....The Fugitive was a massive hit, and a really good film as well. Jones stole the movie from Ford, thanks to his swagger and his banter with his titular team, so it was a good idea to make a side-quel to that movie.What wasn't a good idea though was to make a virtual copy of that film.The Plane crash is too similar to the Train accident, The jump from the building too similar to the dam jump, and the whole conspiracy behind the wanted man.But it's still a fun movie. Jones has lost none of his swagger form the first movie, and is a joy to watch. Snipes is pretty restrained in his role, and the team are as good as they always are, and have that beautiful banter.But it's really worth watching For Downey Jr, but only for the fact that half of the time he has a look on his face as if he doesn't know what time of day it is.Worth seeing for Jones, but nothing really special..
vostf
I was never much interested in watching this spin off of The Fugitive. What attracted me to The Fugitive was Richard Kimble's story fleshed up by Harrison Ford and truckloads of action. Tommy Lee Jones as Sam Gerard stood out and was essential to the overall balance but you would not say that this supporting character was more interesting than the fugitive.Action packed as it is US Marshals lacks a deeper characterisation of Gerard. His team, his temper, his buoyancy, his tidy boss... these are nice touches but don't really build something more than the character we already saw in the previous movie.You can take the two impressive action sequences apart and they just look like another blockbuster's tour de force. In the course of the movie they are not set up as a tension peak, they mostly happen as scripted. Surely there are too many nice/interesting characters to follow (Tommy Lee Jones and 2-3 prominent members of his team, Robert Downey Jr, Wesley Snipes and his lover Irène Jacob) so the editing rhythm is bogged down. The pace is simply not as fast as it should be for action to play to the max.Another big flaw is the 'New Fugitive' character arc: we don't know him from the get-go - whereas the premise of the original Fugitive was about an innocent man accused of his wife's murder and relentlessly tracked down - and then new elements are added that don't draw a clear picture of who he is - and if he is really innocent ! Most notably it is clear soon enough that he is not just your average man: hence empathy and rooting for him can never reach the required level for suspension of disbelief to work (I am especially thinking of the graveyard shooting, a sequence setup which looks blatantly haphazard for such big professional boys).Too bad they rushed such a script into production to poach on the Fugitive real-estate. They didn't need to have another nice innocent fugitive - especially given this protracted macguffin of a plot. Sam Gerard should have been the sole hero, attempting to stop more than a prisoner on the loose, and we should have had a better insight into the man's soul.
ersinkdotcom
What do you do when you release a movie and the co-star's character makes just as much of an impact on viewers as the main actor? Obviously you find a way to exploit the situation by coming up with another project to put that actor and character into. That's exactly what producers of "The Fugitive" did with Tommy Lee Jones' law enforcer, Sam Gerard.You shift the focus from the fugitive and place it on the men put in charge of catching him. They didn't want to veer too far off the beaten path, so you still have to have an innocent man running for his life and he has to have some type of star power. When "U.S. Marshals" came out in 1998, Wesley Snipes was a hot commodity and seemed like the perfect choice to play the role of the sympathetic man on the lamb.As an action film, this gets the job done. It does its best to be as good as "The Fugitive" but not get stuck trying to one-up it or be better. There's the obvious attempt at making the wreck in "U.S. Marshals" more of a spectacle by having the vehicle be an airplane instead of a passenger train. Besides that, it just seemed like director Stuart Baird wanted to make a good old fashioned crime caper with some mystery injected. Most viewers might be lost as to what the actual "item" causing all the trouble or the motivation for the whole movie is. All anyone really wants to know by the end of the film is if Snipes is innocent and, if so, who is guilty.
AD
