But QT, despite his love for disreputable trash culture, still has cred with tweedy types, at least the ones who don't puke whenever someone pricks their finger onscreen. And after almost 20 years (seriously, Reservoir Dogs was 1992 . . . I wonder if I can find a good wheelchair on eBay . . .) we're used to QT sitting on that fence. I however, in the interests of science, must insist that we find a much less likely example of a hybrid between brows low and high.
I propose that we look at a movie from the director of the Chuck Norris vehicle Code of Silence, the Steven Seagal vehicles Above the Law and Under Siege, and the better but still disreputable Gene Hackman thriller The Package. Andrew Davis, in all the aforementioned movies with the exception of Under Siege, displays a vivid, familiar sense of the city of Chicago, and frequently employs the same local character actors in small parts, including the lovely and talented Joe Kosala—
—and the single best actor in the history of cinema at playing blue-collar dudes from Chicago, Mr. Ron Dean.
(Note: if any of you mention that he played Emilio Estevez' dad in The Breakfast Club, I will put my foot so far up your ass we'll look like a Guillermo Del Toro FX shot)
Proudly scruffy track record aside, Andrew Davis had always been a director of rather more skill than the average dipshit who pays the rent directing Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal movies. And thus, Warner Bros hired him to direct . . .
The Fugitive is a classic Warner Bros picture (per the same Aljean Harmetz quote I used when talking about Casablanca: “nearly every Warner Bros picture was an exception to the auteur theory”) in that the studio, rather than giving over too much trust to one of those wacky auteur types who're always talking about that homocommie “creative control” horseshit, hired a team of writers and a guy who could direct—and who had a solid, stylish sense of the place where the movie was set—but wouldn't start shit, cast the most reliable movie star of his generation, sat back, and made money.
For all the crap Hollywood churns out, and they sure do put out Augean stables levels of crap, occasionally they strike gold. Their rate of success is low enough that the odd gem now and again is more an accident than anything else, but high enough that you can't completely write the studios off. The Fugitive came out at a time in my life when I was just starting to get really cranky about Hollywood and fancied myself solely into foreign and independent cinema, and forced me to reassess that stance. Any force powerful enough to get a teenager to admit he's wrong is probably capable of vaporizing planets.
The Fugitive is based on a very popular television series from the 1960s that I've never seen. (The phrase “popular television series that I've never seen” is almost redundant; I'm still only up to season 2 of Lost.) The movie stars Harrison Ford as Richard Kimball, successful Chicago vascular surgeon, whose wife is murdered. Harrison Ford tells homicide detectives Joe Kosala and Ron Dean that a one-armed man is responsible. Detectives Kosala and Dean are skeptical. So is the rest of the criminal justice system: Harrison Ford is indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death before the end of the opening credits. Sure, they fudge things a bit so the credits are longer than they usually are, but the fact that they railroad him that fast is reinforced by the fact that you don't see Andrew Davis' director credit until Harrison Ford is getting on the bus to prison, which fucking rules ass.
On the bus, things quickly go a bit squiffy (in the parlance of Martin Freeman in Hot Fuzz) and the other convicts try to shank the guards and bust out. One of the guards picks that moment to conduct an experiment in practical physics, namely blowing the back of the driver's head off with an errant shotgun blast and seeing how long it takes before the bus crashes.
The result: not very long. The bus goes somersaulting down a hill onto some train tracks. Harrison Ford, the first guard who got shanked, the retard guard with the shotgun, and poorly socialized convict Eddie Bo Smith, Jr. are the only ones to survive the experiment. Then, at just about the most perfectly timed moment ever, a train appears. Fuck. Harrison Ford asks for help getting the wounded guard out, but the other guard and the other convict are all every man for himself and stuff, leaving Harrison Ford to nobly extract the guy from the crushed bus, cutting timing so close that he has to leap from the top of the bus right before it gets hit by the train (a fucking really cool stunt). The train then derails and Harrison Ford has to haul ass to keep from being run over (a fucking really cool stunt). All this after Harrison Ford got his side ripped open in the crash. No rest for the weary.
That whole bus crash/train crash sequence is easily one of the holyfuckdidthatjusthappenest action sequences ever. None of that pansy-ass CGI nonsense, not even too much green screen, just straight up stunt work. It leads to an aftermath that Tommy Lee Jones, upon arrival at the scene, accurately assesses: “My my my. What. A. Mess.”
A brief pause is necessary before we continue. Tommy Lee Jones is cooler in this movie than just about anybody ever has been before or since. And I'm not just talking in movies. Not only does he have a lot of great lines—and he sure got hooked up in that regard—but he delivers them with such style. His US Marshal Sam Gerard is a cranky bastard, an extremely intelligent cranky bastard with a fierce sense of purpose: he is going to catch you, dead, alive, maimed, in one piece, whatever, but you are getting caught. He's one of my favorite movie characters ever, because under the right circumstances you could have a hell of a time having a beer with him but if you piss him off you will get your shit fucking destroyed.
Okay, let's continue. Tommy Lee Jones and his team of extremely competent wiseasses (including Joe Pantoliano and no fewer than two Lost castaways) descend upon the scene, calmly assessing and looking with disfavor upon the local sheriffs, who have their less-intelligent heads up their provincial asses. Tommy Lee Jones will have none of this foolishness:
Tommy Lee Jones: Sheriff Rawlins, with all due respect, I'd like to suggest checkpoints on a 15 mile radius out here on I-57, I-24, and on route 13 out of Chester--
Sheriff Rawlins: Whoa whoa whoa. The prisoners are all dead and all checkpoints are gonna do is get a lotta good people frantic around here and flood my office with calls.
Tommy Lee Jones (best deadpan ever): Well shit, sheriff, I'd hate to see that happen so I guess I'll just take over your investigation.
Sheriff Rawlins (sputters for like a year, then): On what authority?
Tommy Lee Jones: Governor of the state of Illinois, United States Marshal's office, 5th District, Northern Illinois.
And what, motherfucker? Man, Tommy Lee Jones' performance in this movie is good. And he only just got started too. Once the chain of command is readjusted, the sheriff tries to recover his vacant nutsack by making a lame crack about Wyatt Earp, but Tommy Lee just sighs at this display of inferior wit and sends every cop in the Midwest after Harrison Ford.
AND SO THE CHASE BEGINS. The pursuit is masterfully constructed; you never get the feeling that Harrison Ford is any farther than like two, maybe three inches away from getting arrested, and that's when things are relaxed. He busts into a hospital, steals an old guy's food, patches up his wound, shaves his beard, steals some doctor threads, and on his way out, runs into a cop.
Cop: Hey, Doc. Have you seen [reads description of Harrison Ford off the Wanted poster]?
Harrison Ford: Every time I look in the mirror, pal. Except for the beard of course.
Cop nods.
Harrison Ford walks away.
Cop: Hey, Doc!
Harrison Ford shits a brick.
The cop gestures to Harrison Ford's open fly.
Harrison Ford exhales, does up his zipper, and fucks off.
Then, right as Harrison Ford is leaving the hospital, the paramedics are bringing in the wounded guard from the train wreck. Harrison Ford hollers some shit to the paramedics so the ER doctors can save the guard's life, then he steals an ambulance.
Tommy Lee Jones, a smidge disappointed that Harrison Ford has decided to escape with such absence of subtlety, starts chasing him in a helicopter. They corner Harrison Ford in the tunnels by this big-ass dam. Then, this classic exchange:
Harrison Ford: I didn't kill my wife!
Tommy Lee Jones: I don't care!
Fuck, man, was an Oscar enough for this performance? We couldn't knight him? That'd be cool, Sir Tommy Lee Jones, with his Texas accent. Maybe sainthood: St. Tommy Lee Jones, patron saint of character actors whose dicks drag the ground, martyred by D. Bowes for doing Men in Black 3 in 2013.
So, Harrison Ford is in a tight spot. The cool thing about having been in as many movies as he had by this point, and playing as many guys who kicked as much ass as he had, is that he had a lot of experience to draw on. He thus takes a page out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and takes a leap of faith off the dam. Tommy Lee Jones, having been too busy filming The Package in 1989 to have seen Last Crusade, didn't see it coming, and gets pissed off, angrily barking at his by-now enormous coterie of cops to dredge the river looking for the (presumably dead) Harrison Ford.
This was one of the two things critics whined about in The Fugitive. “But anyone who tried jumping off that dam would have been killed!” they argued. Nuh uh, foolish mortal. Harrison Ford doesn't get killed. He didn't asphyxiate in that bullshit Jabba the Hut shrink-wrapped him in in Empire. The (other) Replicants didn't kill him in Blade Runner. The Amish didn't kill him for being a douchebag in Witness. Neither the Nazis nor all those racist Indian stereotypes in Temple of Doom managed to kill Indiana Jones (only George Lucas managed to kill Indiana Jones). Hell, Sean fuckin Bean, 006 himself, motherfuckin Boromir motherfucker, couldn't even kill Harrison Ford in Patriot Games. Some wimpy ass hundred-foot drop into heavy currents with probably a lot of sharp rocks and shit all over the place isn't going to do it.
The chase continues, though Harrison Ford has a bit more breathing room. He colors his hair (the inspiration for one of the top 5 all-time great quotes in my “only white guy in the movie theater” career at the old Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn: “Son, Han Solo uses Dark & Natural, nigga!”) and catches a ride from a friendly woman.
This leads to the other thing critics complained about: the next scene when, without mentioning anyone's name, the Marshals all sit around talking about how they just closed in on a fugitive who “shacked up with some babe.” It transpires that the the fugitive they kill in the ensuing pursuit (as Tommy Lee Jones later explains, “He was trying to kill one of my kids [read: Marshals], sir”) was not Harrison Ford, but the belligerent Eddie Bo Smith, Jr.
Harrison Ford comes back to Chicago. He contacts his lawyer, and the Marshals, having tapped the phone, listen in. An entertaining exchange ensues wherein Tommy Lee Jones looks at this one random marshal like he has a tentacle coming out of his head for suggesting that the train they hear in the background sounds elevated (“You must have ears like an eagle.”) They listen to the tape a few more times, and isolate the sound of the train conductor saying the name of a stop on the El.
Tommy Lee Jones: I knew that was an elevated train.
Though the Marshals know he's in Chicago, Harrison Ford still manages to lay low, renting out an apartment from a Polish woman and her dickhead son, contacting old friend Jeroen Krabbe, and getting started on infiltrating a hospital to look for the one-armed man.
Minor aside here, regarding Hollywood semiotics. Jeroen Krabbe's name in this movie is Charles Nichols. Good solid WASP name. A guy named Charles Nichols, living in Chicago, who is a hotshot doctor at a hospital, is going to have a neutral American accent, and how recently he got rich will determine how much Midwest creeps into it. Follow me so far? Jeroen Krabbe in this movie has a really fuckin thick Dutch accent. He's awesome, no argument there. But he's the only guy in the movie with a Euro accent. His character would not have a Dutch accent. That is, if what they were going for is realism. I submit the theory that Andrew Davis, underrated director that he is, wanted to semiotically clue the audience in that Jeroen Krabbe was the bad guy . . . because a Euro accent is a signifier of villainy. Ah, that $150k liberal arts education was totally fucking worth it . . .
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Jeroen Krabbe is totally nice to Harrison Ford at first, the first person he encounters from his old life who is (his lawyer dicks him over almost enthusiastically). So, with Jeroen Krabbe's help, Harrison Ford gets the ball rolling finding out who the hell the one-armed man was. (“I know he looks like Andreas Katsulas, but I need more than that to go on . . .”) He infiltrates the hospital, poses as a janitor, and gets a list of dudes with the same prosthetic arm as Andreas Katsulas, simplifying his search.
He also inadvertently gets ensnared by Julianne Moore (who gets third billing, before she was famous, for being in two scenes . . . something I never quite understood, not that I minded or anything) to take some kid on a stretcher somewhere. Harrison Ford is unable to suppress his old doctor instincts, and checks the kid's chest X-ray, discovering that the kid was misdiagnosed. Harrison Ford then takes the kid where he should be, displaying some good Harrison Ford bedside manner along the way.
But Julianne Moore saw the janitor checking out the chest film. And Julianne Moore may be a lot of things (hot, talented, red-haired) but dumb is not one of them. So she yoinks Harrison Ford's fake janitor badge and snitches him to Tommy Lee Jones. After a scene where it randomly becomes apparent that Julianne Moore and Tommy Lee Jones really want to shtup, Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pantoliano stumble upon the prosthetics department, and realize Harrison Ford's been looking for something in there.
Cue the next great chase sequence in the picture. Harrison Ford, in one of the ballsiest moves ever, goes to visit who he thinks is Andreas Katsulas . . . in jail. With cops fucking everywhere. Talk about suspense. Harrison Ford, though, takes advantage of his experience in cinema—he knows that even the couple times he played bad guys (in The Conversation and Apocalypse Now) he still got away with it, so he knows he'll get away with it this time. And he does; he sits down and the prisoner comes out . . . but it's not Andreas Katsulas, it's some black guy with a cool fro. Although the guy points out, “You got me down here, might as well talk about somethin'. Ain't no cable in this damn place,” Harrison Ford respectfully excuses himself so the ninety billion cops in the fucking building don't bust him, and makes his way as stealthily out as he can.
But not even Harrison Ford can sneak by Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones and his guys chase Harrison Ford (who must have hurt his leg at some point, he's limping like fuck during this whole chase, which actually adds to the suspense). When Harrison Ford manages to get on the other side of the bulletproof emergency doors, Tommy Lee Jones shoots to kill, which kind of surprises Harrison Ford, but not enough that he can't get out and disappear into the St. Patrick's Day parade.
In fairly short order, Harrison Ford finds Andreas Katsulas. It turns out Andreas Katsulas is the security guy for a pharmaceutical company Harrison Ford has encountered a while back. Their big experimental drug had been fucking people up, and Harrison Ford had found out how badly it had been fucking people up, so the pharmaceutical company decided to fuck him up. (Note: there is no better villain—since they're all run by evil white guys in suits—than a pharmaceutical company, except maybe a Nazi who kicks puppies and plays basketball for Duke.)
Now that he knows (or so he thinks) the truth, Harrison Ford leaves a couple oblique clues for Tommy Lee Jones, who determines almost immediately what a choad Andreas Katsulas is (he has also, proleptically, gotten off on an awkward, adversarial foot with Jeroen Krabbe). Unfortunately, Harrison Ford doesn't realize that the guy he thinks is behind everything was murdered and posthumously framed at the order of his old pal Jeroen Krabbe. (Here's where being cynical and kind of racist would have helped, but no, Harrison Ford only plays good guys).
And so, the Big Finish. Harrison Ford beats the shit out of Andreas Katsulas and pistol-whips him into unconsciousness, but the cop who Andreas Katsulas shoots right before this gets blamed on Harrison Ford, so Joe Kosala, Ron Dean, and the entire trigger-happy Chicago PD go running after Harrison Ford with erections. Harrison Ford, though, having realized Jeroen Krabbe is the bad guy swaggers into the medical conference where he's giving the keynote speech, and drops some J'Accuse. His voice shaking in that “I am Harrison Ford and I am acting” way we know and love, our hero calls Jeroen Krabbe out and basically does everything except slap him in the face with a glove. They go into the other room and commence beating the shit out of each other. The fight spills out all over the hotel, a messy but well-filmed affair. Jeroen Krabbe gives Joe Pantoliano a nasty headache, but Tommy Lee Jones calls out to Harrison Ford that he knows he's innocent and Jeroen Krabbe is the bad guy. This angers our villain, who draws down on Tommy Lee Jones with Joe Pantoliano's gun before Harrison Ford tire-irons him a few times. Our hero and his Javert have a moment.
Tommy Lee Jones: It's over. (Pause) And you know I'm glad? I need the rest.
And all is well. Kind of. Harrison Ford's wife is still dead. He's going to need a bit of R&R before he can go back to being a doctor, if he can indeed bring himself to after this ordeal. But the dudes who fucked up his life have been punished. Sometimes that's all you can really ask for.
I've watched The Fugitive dozens of times since its release. When I was in college, it was a bit of a cult thing for us. The James Newton Howard music that played over a helicopter shot of the El after Joe Pantoliano says “If I fell down these stairs, I'd be a goner. I'd be dead” inspired some (very bad) freestyle rapping after I said one time, “Jay-Z should remix this as Big Pimpin' part II” and my friend Steve coined the immortal couplet “Cuz I'm the Fugitive/So lick my spooge-a-tive.”
The Fugitive gave Andrew Davis' career a bit of a boost. He would go on to direct the eminently respectable (if not all that great) Dial M for Murder remake A Perfect Murder with Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo. Then he went and fucked it up by directing a late-period Arnold vehicle (something must have happened to Arnold on True Lies, because boy did his career suck after that. The Sixth Day was good, but it wasn't that good) and now who the fuck knows what he's up to, because Ron Dean did those NFL commercials a couple years ago and hit the big time and now Andrew Davis is without his secret weapon. Clearly, if Andrew Davis had directed a buddy comedy with Joe Kosala and Ron Dean as the leads, none of this bullshit would have happened.
The best part about The Fugitive is that you can watch it over and over and over and over and it still stays just as good. In fact, knowing that Tommy Lee Jones is just a guy doing his job and not a villain makes it even better. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that the sequel is worth watching. The kid with the ponytail gets killed in it, and that's fucking bullshit. Also, not having Joe Kosala around to ask, “So, de scraytches on yer neck Dack . . . did de one arm gey do dat?” fucks things up. In fact, any movie that doesn't have Joe Kosala and Ron Dean walking around Chicago-ing is just fucking missing something. You heard it here first.
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