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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.
Plot
Kimble is a successful Chicago surgeon who returns home from a party one evening to find his wife dying and a mysterious one-armed man 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 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 the obsessed Sam Gerard and his team of United States Marshals.
There are many close calls with Richard almost getting captured. They are often brought about by Kimble's inability to stop helping those in need. The first is at a hospital where Kimble shaves off his beard, changes clothes into a doctor's uniform and walks past a police officer who is looking for him. 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.
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 use to get in to Cook County Hospital, where he searches the computers in the prosthetic limb area for phone numbers of those who match 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 female doctor 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 internal doubts as to Kimble's guilt, particularly when they show up at one potential criminal's apartment with clues that Kimble has been there. The final showdown occurs at a medical conference 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. The one-armed man had been sent by the pharmaceutical company, Devlin Macgregor, to kill Kimble that night to silence him. Finally, Nichols and the one-armed man are arrested and Gerard symbolically unlocks Kimble's handcuffs before they drive away.
Reception
The Fugitive opened strongly in the United States box office, grossing States dollar|$" target="_blank" >*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. *
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.
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.
External links
1993 films | Best Picture Academy Award nominees | Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winning performance | Films based on television series | Films directed by Andrew Davis | North Carolina films | Chicago films
Auf der Flucht (1993) | Le Fugitif (film) | The Fugitive | 逃亡者 (1993年映画) | Jagad
"The Fugitive (1993 film)"