U.S. Marshals

Oh, my God! What went wrong?

I heard about the bad reviews for years. Always took them with a grain of salt. For one thing, I always figured a lot of them were unhappy Trekkies bashing Stuart Baird for directing Star Trek: Nemesis. I was actually a rare Trekkie who LIKED Nemesis (at least at the time; it's been a few years since I've seen it) so I dismissed those complaints. I assumed it wouldn't be as good as The Fugitive, but I'd find it passable. I tend to review movies better than TV shows anyways. I have a far greater number of positive reviews for movies that other people hate than I do for TV shows.

What is the problem? Basically everything I complimented The Fugitive for is how the movie screwed up. Sam Gerard has become morally compromised, which is insane. I can't believe he actually wound up killing Robert Downey Jr.'s villain character at the end. It's like they ruined what was so great about Gerard to begin with.

I also found a LOT of the movie really low-class (including the bust of the trashy drug dealers at the beginning). Gerard's first appearance being in a chicken costume says this movie is simply more low-brow than the first one was.

As for Sheridan as a protagonist, they made SO many mistakes with him. First of all, at least he was cast right. Wesley Snipes was fine. But the character was all wrong. I think the thinking was to up the stakes for Gerard and make him harder to catch than Kimble. Kimble did so well due to ingenious thinking and basically solving the case on his own. But I think the writers were like, "What if Gerard didn't have to catch a mild-mannered doctor, but a CIA specialist hitman whose skills and youth are greater than his own?" They handicapped Sheridan at the beginning by making him injured. But Richard Kimble believably jumping onto a moving train would never fly. And I think the producers really wanted to up those sorts of action sequences.

But by making Sheridan a more physical match for Gerard, they also made the questionable decision to make him do a LOT of bad stuff to get away from the cops. Sheridan takes hostages. He kills people. He shot Gerard. I don't understand why he was "exonerated" at the end after having shot a cop. Yeah, he was framed for shooting Noah, but he still shot Gerard, whether he declined to make it a killshot or not. I have never heard of a person being given a Mulligan for shooting a cop, even if the cop survived.

Everything I complimented The Fugitive franchise for in my last review has either been erased, ignored, or utterly perverted. I'm a little disgusted.

Do you know the biggest bummer? If this had actually been a good movie, it probably would have been a box office hit, and set off a string of Gerard movies. I would have loved that. Because it sucked and bombed, this is it. And it's a bad place to leave this part of the franchise off on. It annoys me, in fact.

My biggest disappointment is that one of the reasons I thought I'd like the movie turned out to be bogus. When the movie hit theaters, in the trailer Cooper claims to have never seen anything like it, and Gerard says "I have." Audiences clearly didn't know that was Cooper (the part had been recast) and the trailer producers made it sound like Gerard was having a fond memory to Richard Kimble over an escape act Wesley Snipes' character just pulled off. No, he's actually just talking about having seen Sheridan pick a lock with glasses earlier on the same way Robert Downey Jr's character just did. Kimble is not mentioned or referenced at all in the movie, in a glowing, respectful way or not. I realize trailers are often misleading, but back in the late 90's I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And to learn 20 some years later it was bogus makes me dislike the movie even more than I already do. Audiences who saw that in the theater must have been bummed out after 6 months of anticipation past that trailer. I was bummed out after 20 years. I assume I am far more pissed.

Here is something interesting and weird, that I don't understand. For some reason this movie feels far more dated than The Fugitive. And it's not just because this had politically incorrect dialogue and The Fugitive didn't. I found the camera shots and direction of The Fugitive sort of timeless. The jumps cuts here sort of date this from the late 1990's. The technology is more modern, the effects are more sophisticated, and yet I felt more that I was watching "An Old Movie" than I did during The Fugitive.

That was a disaster. *1/2.