Thriller Thursdays: The Fugitive: A classic fast-paced action-thriller!

Intro: In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

Harrison Ford is the quintessential star, who could well be the man you would easily befriend and bring home for dinner. The actor exudes strength and confidence, but also a soft vulnerability, which makes one want to reach out to him — to both seek as well as offer help.

As Dr Richard Kimble, a  vascular surgeon, ragged and tired, finds his wife Helen (Sela Ward) murdered. His fingerprints are all over the crime scene, and her blood is on him, and he is taken into custody as the prime suspect. There is a lack of evidence to suggest that an intruder forced their way into the building. Moreover, it's revealed that Helen has a handsome life insurance policy of which he is the sole beneficiary, and to top it all, there's a misunderstood 911 call from Helen which seems to place Richard in the crime scene. It's an open-&-shut case in the courts and he is convicted of murder and given a death sentence.

Fortuitously, whilst being transported to the prison, there's a car crash and he escapes. A determined, Kimble, is on the trail to find the real killer. He caught a glimpse of the perpetrator when he had entered his home, just as the murderer was leaving. But there's a battery of law enforcement officers after him and in particular a US Marshal, Senior Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) — who couldn't care if Kimble had actually killed his wife or not, his first priority was to retrieve the escaped convict.

The linearity of The Fugitive drives the film relentlessly, as there are breathtaking pursuits, crashes, survival, and reveals. The spectacular escape from the prison van, as a goods train smashes into it, is a dramatic sequence, shot and edited with panache. Also when Kimble reaches the end of a storm drain with only a steep dam to jump into to escape, even as he has the US Marshall standing behind with his gun aimed right at him, the tension translates across the screen. The action is unrelenting and the film adroitly segues into the murky politics and commerce-driven greed of pharmaceutical companies. It is to the film’s credit that the Marshal is never far behind Richard, giving rise to all possibilities of apprehension or resolution. And it is almost as if the mystery is being unravelled by Kimble first and almost immediately followed by the Marshall, till their paths converge, in a suspenseful shootout on the rooftop of a hotel, which then shifts to the laundry room — allegorically a cleansing of lies, as it were.

The Fugitive is a 1993 film, based on a TV series of the 1960s, which itself was loosely based on a true story of a doctor wrongly being accused of killing his pregnant wife. It's a thumping thriller, but since it predates CC cameras and mobile phones, it has a vintage feel. And the resolve to the mystery, now with so many honorary and similar films behind us, can be seen coming from a mile away! But it doesn't detract from some superb filmmaking and acting. Tommy Lee Jones wisecracks his way through the film, often stealing the thunder from Ford. But Ford's gentle amenability carries the audience with him, as he rushes to find the truth in the chaos and frenzy of the chase. What the film does well is to capture the grittiness of Chicago, with its backstreets, alleys, dark highways, hospitals, skyscrapers, lakes, all seamlessly integrated into the tale. The camera is a faithful follower of Ford, and the immediacy of action is captured with pungency, with handheld cameras being used to follow, pursue, and chase. The music follows the action effectively, and like all good scores often seems to drive it.

More importantly, in its tale of a medical misdemeanour, it predates movies such as The Constant Gardner, Love & Other Drugs, Mission: Impossible II, which seeks to unveil the bare-knuckle pursuit of profit. Whilst no pharma company ever will admit to any wrongdoings, the examples are too many to ignore. For instance, pharma company, Merck insisted that the arthritis drug Vioxx was safe, even as information emerged linking it to higher cardiovascular risks and had to settle a multi-million dollar settlement. Similarly. GlaxoSmithKline reached a $3 billion settlement with the U.S. government that resolved claims over its marketing of diabetes drug Avandia, which was also linked to higher cardiovascular risks. And the most dramatic of recent cases, where the Sackler family's Purdue Pharma was found guilty of having caused a deadly opioid pandemic in the USA with their painkiller drug OxyContin through deceptive marketing. Embracing this corruption into its thriller format elevates The Fugitive as being relevant even to this day.

The icing on the cake is that the film received seven Oscar nominations and Tommy Lee Jones won the Best Supporting Actor Award for his role as the determined and sanguine U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard.

Trivia:

• Tommy Lee Jones reportedly told his actor-friend Joe Pantoliano, “It's not like anyone is going to win any awards for this film.” Ironically, the movie was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and 3 Golden Globes, with Jones himself winning both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for this film.
• Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, Richard Gere, Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, and Al Pacino were considered for the role of Richard Kimble, which finally went to Harrison Ford.
• The film’s director Andrew Davis only had one chance to crash the train in the terrific train scene and he had no choice but to get it right, so he consulted an array of engineers, stunt doubles and the insurance company to predict what would happen. The train was expected to crash into the bus at 35 miles per hour, but the director was in error — the train came at 42 miles per hour. Nevertheless, the scene went exactly as planned, and became a classic scene, filmed without any digital intervention, which was virtually unknown in those times.

Watch The Fugitive here. 

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)