U.S. Marshals

Warner Brothers got the right vibes from Tommy Lee Jones and his character in the bigscreen version of The Fugitive and the suits clearly thought they might have a new franchise in the making. Unfortunately they thought wrong, at least from a financial perspective since this movie only seems to have a box office gross roughly equivalent to their cost. Or possibly Jones changed his mind after the success of the first Men in Black, released months before and still making the cash register sing.

I liked U.S. Marshals and would have been glad to see another featuring this crew; I bet Jones would rather have made another than the pathetic Space Cowboys and just sad Man of the House. Though Wesley Snipes wouldn’t have featured again, Joe Pantoliano, Kate Nelligan, Daniel Roebuck and LaTanya Richardson made a good assortment around the typically gruff, hard-ass Jones. Oh well.

Written by John Pogue (his first produced script, though he went on to write all three Skulls flicks) and directed by Stuart Baird (who next directed the criminally underrated Star Trek: Nemesis), the marshals are tasked with transporting a (wrongly accused, of course) Snipes and other assorted alleged felons to New York City when one of the bad men, using a gun assembled form parts hidden in the toilet paper holder, tries to kill Snipes and instead blows a hole in the plane cabin wall. He and a couple of others are promptly sucked out but most survive the crash.

Snipes had already picked the handcuff lock and escapes in the confusion, leading Jones et al on a fugitive hunt. Wesley knows who set him up, or who can lead him to the right man, and stays clear of the marshals long enough to get there. The villains are corrupt, money hungry US government officials in collusion with some nasty Chinese intelligence agents.

The important thing in a movie like U.S. Marshals is pacing. Accelerating tension with shorter and shorter breathing spaces until the climax, when the Right Thing must happen. In this instance, as in the first movie, the marshals’ target has to prove his innocence and put the real bad guy in the frame instead, and Jones and the unjustly accused hero must grudgingly acknowledge respect for the other.

Baird, who mainly works as an editor, does this very well. Speeding SUVs run into Manhattan traffic jams, footraces down alleys where the only exit is a padlocked backdoor, even the opening, accidental crash of Snipes’ towtruck. There’s no mystery for us in Snipes’ innocence because, of course, even if the movie didn’t make that plain early on the trailers telegraph this spoiler; not that viewers like me care or would have doubted it since that’s the franchise’s key differentiator .

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