There are movies that feel very much like the decade they came from.
The Fugitive somehow doesn’t.
Harrison Ford plays Dr. Richard Kimble, convicted of murdering his wife and sent to prison for a crime he insists he didn’t commit. He gets an opportunity to escape, and from that point forward the movie basically never stops moving.
But what makes The Fugitive so good is that it isn’t just a chase movie.
Kimble is trying to stay free long enough to figure out who actually killed his wife, while Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard — played perfectly by Tommy Lee Jones — is methodically closing in on him.
Neither character is stupid. Neither one survives because the screenplay suddenly makes everyone else incompetent. That alone makes the movie unusually satisfying.
Ford is exactly the right actor for Kimble: intelligent, frightened, exhausted, and determined without ever turning into an action superhero.
And Jones nearly steals the movie.
His Gerard is relentless, funny, and completely uninterested in Kimble’s claims of innocence. His job is to catch an escaped prisoner, and that’s exactly what he intends to do.
If you somehow missed The Fugitive, there’s really only one thing I can say:
Fix that.
