Review: U.S. MARSHALS

“THE FUGITIVE” – IT’S IQ = “U.S. MARSHALS”

(reviewed on HBO during spring break)

    What do you do when your movie makes a LOT of money? No, you don’t go buy a whore, you make a sequel, because there’s more green where that came from. Problem is, the first movie more or less resolved EVERYTHING. The good guy who had been framed was now innocent and everything was hunkey dorey. So what the fuck do you do? You could still make a sequel, but the main character can’t be in it, he’s off the hook. How about the supporting player…yeah, he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He’s perfect. We’ll make him the star this time, and we’ll have his boys from the first film back. But what will the new main charcter be doing? Okay, we’ll take the first film and add a new fugitive, this one will be black. And since the only good thing about the first film was the awesome train crash, we’ll add a plane crash which is twice the excitement! And we’ll add much more action this time, and forget Chicago, we’ll go to New York! To copy even more from the first film, the new fugitive will have to solve the mystery of who framed him and why. For all those men we’ll add a gorgeous chick. Make her French? Perfect. Let’s call it "The Fugitive 2!" No, wait, we don’t want to market it as a sequel per se, more like a brand new film with a few of the same characters. So it’s a new adventure, you don’t have to know about the first film, this one can stand on it’s own. We’ll call it “U.S. Marshals”, because the new main character is a U.S. Marshall.
    “Marshals” follows Tommy Lee Jones as Sam Gerard hunting a new fugitive, Wesley Snipes, who has to un-frame himself before they catch him. Of course everything wraps up into a nice little ball at the end, and there’s enough chases to make the movie watchable, but in the end it just doesn’t measure up to much.
    “The Fugitive”, in my mind, was overplayed. It had a killer train crash in it but the rest was just okay. The critics raved it and it racked up over one-hundred million. Tommy Lee Jones got his Oscar (which he didn’t deserve…since when do Oscars get handed to cardboard cutouts?) and the film turned into a classic drama which was more or less a popcorn Hollywood film in disguise. But at least “The Fugitive” pretended to be smart and at least had a slick anti-popcorn tone to it.
    “U.S. Marshals” is as stupid as a drunk donkey at 4 AM on a Tuesday. It doesn’t try to be smart (I hope it doesn’t…my God I hope) and that’s good, but it’s just so ridiculous. There are enough plot holes here to fit the Titanic through, and the characters are so under-developed that the movie, in the end, plays out like 2 hours and 6 minutes of chases. Chase through a swamp, chase through a building, chase through a cruise ship, chase through a cemetery. I like chase scenes, but these aren’t exactly anything special. Wesley Snipes’ story of how he was framed is idiotic and rigid at best. It doesn’t truly explain everything. If he was a special operative for the government why is he driving a tow truck in Chicago? Couldn’t he get a better job than that? I think the only reason for that is so he gets into a “cool” popcorn opening crash sequence, but he had all that money stashed away why was he working at all?
    And is his French girlfriend illegally in the country only so the marshals have a good blackmailing strategy?
    Regardless of how dumb and flimsy the film is, at least it entertains, and usually that’s all I ask for. But if the SATs consisted of you watching this film and writing the plot down exactly, you know that Ivy League school would become a distant dream. ** (out of ****)