The Fugitive (1993 film)

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The Fugitive
Image:The Fugitive movie.jpg Movie poster for The Fugitive
Directed by	Andrew Davis
Produced by	Arnold Kopelson
Written by	Roy Huggins (Characters), David Twohy (Story and screenplay), Jeb Stuart (Screenplay)
Starring	Harrison Ford Tommy Lee Jones Sela Ward Julianne Moore Joe Pantoliano L. Scott Caldwell
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	August 6, 1993
Running time	130 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

For the TV series, see The Fugitive (TV series).

The Fugitive is a 1993 Academy Award and Golden Globe Award winning feature film, based on the television series The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, and Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard. Jones won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. It also featured Andreas Katsulas as the one-armed man, Sela Ward as Kimble's wife, Jeroen Krabbé, Julianne Moore, and Joe Pantoliano. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, one of the few films associated with a television series to be so honored.

1 Plot
2 Reception
3 Filming
4 The spin-off
5 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is a successful Chicago vascular surgeon who returns home from an operation after a party one evening to find his wife dying following a brutal attack and a mysterious one-armed man with a prosthetic arm escaping. Despite his attempts to save her and his testimony about the one-armed man, Kimble is convicted of first-degree murder, due to evidence such as a misunderstood 9-1-1 call and no signs of forced entry by the one-armed man. Kimble is sentenced to death by lethal injection.

While being transported to prison, Kimble escapes after a revolt by other prisoners which causes the bus to crash onto a train line (that also causes the train to derail). As a fugitive from justice, he becomes the quarry of Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), who leads a crack team of manhunters from the US Marshals Service.

There are many close calls with Richard almost getting captured. They are often brought about by Kimble's drive to help those in need. The first instance is at a hospital after Kimble shaves off his beard, changes clothes into a doctor's uniform. He sees one of the corrections officers wounded in the revolt and helps the man, who recognizes him, as he is being brought into the hospital. Kimble tries to escape by stealing an ambulance but is forced to a halt by a police road block in a tunnel. He exits the ambulance and is pursued by Gerard through the tunnel's drainage system. Kimble escapes his pursuers by leaping a great height down the spillway of a dam into the river below.

Image:Fugitive2 tommy.jpg

As Gerard's team of Marshals hunts down the remaining escapees, Kimble returns to Chicago to search for the one-armed man who killed his wife. He rents an apartment and there he makes fake ID cards to pose as a janitor to get access to Cook County Hospital, where he searches the computers in the prosthetic limb area for patient information matching the description of the one-armed man. Unfortunately the people he has chosen to stay with include a drug dealer and as the police arrive to arrest the dealer, Kimble has another close call. The drug dealer later informs police Kimble had been living with them. While police arrive at the apartment, Kimble is confronted at the hospital by a doctor (Julianne Moore) who had seen him change a young patient's medical orders so that he could have a life-saving operation, but Kimble manages to escape.

Going through the list of men with prosthetic limbs, Kimble discovers that one is in jail for armed robbery. He visits this man but sees that it is not his wife's murderer. Trying to understand Kimble's movements, Gerard also found that same man on a list of one-armed men with criminal records. Gerard arrives shortly after Kimble giving him a close call when they pass on the stairs, but he manages to escape into a Saint Patrick's Day parade.

Kimble's innate intelligence keeps him one step ahead of Gerard who begins to have doubts as to Kimble's guilt, particularly after Kimble finally finds and breaks into the house of his one-armed quarry, Frederick Sykes, finding evidence of Sykes' ties to Kimble's hospital and deliberately drawing Gerard's team to the house. Suspicious, Gerard and his Marshals begin to investigate Sykes and Kimble's hospital. The final showdown occurs at a medical conference at a hotel where the truth is finally revealed: Kimble was getting close to producing evidence that an experimental drug, called Provasic, nearing FDA approval was causing serious liver damage, and if revealed would have been detrimental to Devlin Macgregor, the pharmaceutical company producing Provasic. Image:Andreas37.jpg The one-armed man had been sent by the pharmaceutical company, Devlin Macgregor, to kill Kimble that night to silence him. Dr. Charles Nichols, one of Kimble's closest friends and colleagues, was covering up the medical evidence and gave the one-armed man the key to Kimble's home. Armed with incontrovertible evidence, Kimble challenges Nichols, who is giving a speech at the conference, with what he knows about the conspiracy and pursues him out of the conference room.

They begin to fight through the hotel as the Chicago Police Department, wrongly believing Kimble to be a cop-killer and intent on taking him down at any cost, cordon off the hotel and Gerard, now convinced of Kimble's innocence, races to find him in the hotel before the police do.

In a final showdown in the hotel's laundry, Gerard calls out to Kimble, laying out everything he knows about Kimble's innocence and the conspiracy against him, and urging him to turn himself in to Gerard before the police kill him. Nichols, having heard Gerard's announcement and having taken a gun from one of Gerard's team, comes up behind Gerard to shoot him but Kimble, in one more act of decency, saves Gerard's life by attacking and knocking Nichols unconscious. At last, Gerard takes Kimble into custody and out of the hotel as Nichols and the one-armed man are arrested. In the police car, Gerard symbolically unlocks Kimble's handcuffs and offers him an ice-pack for his hands before they drive away.

[edit] Reception

The Fugitive opened strongly in the United States box office, grossing $23,758,855 in its first weekend and holding the top spot for six weeks. It eventually went on to gross an estimated $183,875,760 in the US, and $353,900,000 worldwide. [1]

It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, of which it only won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Tommy Lee Jones. The other Oscars it was nominated for were Best Picture; Best Cinematography; Sound Effects Editing; Film Editing; Original Music Score; and Sound. Jones also received numerous other awards for his role, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture.

It was notable enough to inspire a parody film, Wrongfully Accused.

It also created the catch phrase: "looking for the one-armed man", which refers to anyone who is framed for a crime or other infraction and is seeking the real perpetrator. This, of course, is in reference to the Richard Kimble's endeavor to find the one-armed man who killed his wife.

[edit] Filming

A large portion of the principal filming of the film, especially the portions where Kimble escapes and is on the run was set in rural Illinois but was actually filmed in Jackson County, North Carolina in the Great Smoky Mountains. The famous scene involving Kimble's prison transport bus and a freight train wreck was filmed along the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad just outside of Dillsboro, North Carolina. Riders on the excursion railroad can still see the wreckage on the way out of the Dillsboro depot. Scenes in a hospital after Kimble's escape were filmed at Harris Regional Hospital in Sylva, North Carolina.

[edit] The spin-off

Jones returned as Gerard in a spin-off released in 1998, U.S. Marshals which also featured Wesley Snipes, Robert Downey Jr. and Joe Pantoliano. While the second movie also features Gerard's team of marshals hunting down an escaped fugitive under a death sentence, it does not involve Kimble or the events of the first movie in any way.