The Fugitive (1993)

I was a bit surprised at how old-fashioned a movie The Fugitive, a 1993 nominee for Best Picture, is. I don't mean that in the sense that it sounds, perhaps, but this movie is a tribute to the ways that suspense and drama and even special effects used to be handled before CGI took over the world. This film isn't really that old, but no one in Hollywood makes movies like this now, ones where character development gets more screen time than explosions.

The movie's plot borrows only loosely from the television show that inspired it. Dr. Richard Kimble's wife is murdered, he goes to jail for the crime, yet he manages to escape and tries to clear his name by finding the one-armed man with whom he struggled on the night of his wife's death. The rest of the movie really follows a couple of plot lines: one involving Kimble's attempts to locate information about his wife's killer and the other involving the federal marshals led by Tommy Lee Jones in their attempt to locate Kimble.

Both Harrison Ford as Kimble and Jones as Marshall Samuel Gerard are excellent here; these are two smart actors who allow audiences to see the ways they are trying to trick each other throughout the plot. Ford, in particular, gets to do some amazing work here, displaying a range of emotions from the devastation of finding his wife dead to anger when he confronts publicly the man responsible for her death. He also gets to show how quickly a person can think under pressure; none of his actions seem completely out of the realm of possibility. Jones has a more internal performance. His are the not the big action scenes; instead, he must show Gerard's way of thinking. It's a tough job to pull off for most actors, but not Jones, who is a master of both hiding and revealing emotions on the screen. His interactions with the deputy marshals is a highlight of the film for me. They trade barbs and speculations, but Jones is almost always proven to be right.

The train crash that allows Kimble to escape imprisonment is pretty spectacular. (It does put the one in The Greatest Show on Earth to shame, but that was 40 years earlier, after all.) However, most of the action of the film is not dependent upon spectacle. This is not a movie where special effects dominate the story. Instead, they arise from the plot in a very organic fashion. It's quite remarkable to think how much movies have already changed in just the last 15 years. If this film were to be remade today--and please, don't get the idea to do that--it would undoubtedly be a special effects bonanza. However, we care more about Kimble and what happens to him because there is a human at the heart of this story, not explosions.