U.S. Marshals Review
by Curtis Edmonds (blueduck AT hsbr DOT org)March 23rd, 1998
by Curtis Edmonds -- [email protected]
It's easy to dismiss U.S. Marshals. It's nothing more than a sequel to The Fugitive, a far superior film. Wesley Snipes, while passable as fugitive Mark Sheridan, is no Harrison Ford. The supporting cast blends into the scenery as though they were wearing camoflauge. The plot is paper-thin, and the movie's big surprise is obvious from the first reel.
You can make all of these criticisms, and you would be quite right and justified to make them. No matter. For all its flaws -- and it has many -- U.S. Marshals has Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard, and that's all it needs to be a success.
I say that because U.S. Marshals -- even though it recycles Gerard's character from The Fugitve -- is not that movie's spiritual heir. U.S. Marshals is actually looking past The Fugitive, all the way into the dim reaches of time, to the days when Inspector Harry Callahan still walked the foggy streets of San Francisco. This, my friends, is a Dirty Harry picture. And if anyone out there is qualified to fill Clint Eastwood's brogans as this generation's police action hero, it's Jones. Jones has the same killer stare, the same charisma, the same dry sense of humor as Eastwood did in his prime.
And like Eastwood, Jones can carry a movie all by his lonesome, as he has to here. Jones got a richly-deserved Oscar for his turn as Gerard in The Fugitive, and his acting is the same quality here, even if the film isn't. He's not given any of the memorable lines of dialogue he had in the last movie ("My, my, my. What. A. Mess," or "Think me up a chocolate donut with some of them sprinkles," or even "I don't care!") but it doesn't matter. Even in a ludicrous chicken suit in the movie's opening scenes, he's got a magnetic screen presence that saves U.S. Marshals from being hideously bad.
I'm not going to recapitulate the plot here because there isn't one, it's just Jones chasing Snipes. The action sequences aren't especially well-done, and they're shot full of cliches where they make any sense at all. (One wonders, for example, how the shackled prisoners on the "Con-Air" type transport are supposed to get their chained hands up far enough to reach the oxygen masks that fall as the plane crashes.) The relationship between Jones and his team isn't as interesting as you might have thought from the first movie -- but even at that, it's more interesting than the relationship between Snipes and his girlfriend, French actress Irene Jacob.
This is a very bad movie with one great performance that redeems it. My advice is to disconnect your brain, forget there ever was a movie called The Fugitive, get some popcorn and enjoy the movie for what it is. U.S. Marshals may or may not make your day, but all of us punks have to feel lucky that Tommy Lee Jones works as hard as he does. (When does MIB2 come out again?)
Rating: B+
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Curtis "BlueDuck" Edmonds
[email protected]
The Hollywood Stock Brokerage and Resource
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