U.S. Marshals (1998)

This is the film that Robert Downey Jr said was "possibly the worst action movie of all time." I think he's wrong. He plays Special Agent Royce, against Wesley Snipes' Mark Sheridan and in the company of Tommy Lee Jones' Sam Gerard, who steals every scene he is in. Maybe Downey was a bit jealous.There's lots that is good about the film: the camera-work and the editing and the music, which is unobtrusive, as it should be. So credit to Andrjez Bartkowiak, who's been active since 1975, Terry Rawlings, who has been in films since 1957, and Jerry Goldsmith, who has been doing this stuff since 1954! Sometimes experience shows. Stuart Baird, in a rare outing as director also brings a wealth of experience in holding the whole thing together.The plot was too complex for me to take in on one viewing. This may be one of those films you need to see twice to piece things together.For me, I struggle a bit with Wesley Snipes. I know he has a big following but I just don't warm to him. His relationship with his girlfriend played by Irene Jacob, is unconvincing. It doesn't help that Jacob does not seem entirely comfortable with the English language, though she does look gorgeous.Overall, good film. Almost great. Worth a viewing.

What do you do when you release a movie and the co-star's character makes just as much of an impact on viewers as the main actor? Obviously you find a way to exploit the situation by coming up with another project to put that actor and character into. That's exactly what producers of "The Fugitive" did with Tommy Lee Jones' law enforcer, Sam Gerard.You shift the focus from the fugitive and place it on the men put in charge of catching him. They didn't want to veer too far off the beaten path, so you still have to have an innocent man running for his life and he has to have some type of star power. When "U.S. Marshals" came out in 1998, Wesley Snipes was a hot commodity and seemed like the perfect choice to play the role of the sympathetic man on the lamb.As an action film, this gets the job done. It does its best to be as good as "The Fugitive" but not get stuck trying to one-up it or be better. There's the obvious attempt at making the wreck in "U.S. Marshals" more of a spectacle by having the vehicle be an airplane instead of a passenger train. Besides that, it just seemed like director Stuart Baird wanted to make a good old fashioned crime caper with some mystery injected. Most viewers might be lost as to what the actual "item" causing all the trouble or the motivation for the whole movie is. All anyone really wants to know by the end of the film is if Snipes is innocent and, if so, who is guilty.

"You wanna start running again?" - Chief Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) "US Marshals", a sequel to "The Fugitive", finds actor Tommy Lee Jones and his band of likable trackers hot on the trail of Mark Roberts (Wesley Snipes), a man wrongly convicted of a crime.Jones has become a bit of an archetype, popping up in countless cat-and-mouse/predator-and-prey movies over the years. In films like "The Fugitive, "Men In Black", "The Hunted", "Three Burials", "US Marshals", "In The Valley of Elah", "The Missing", "In The Electric Mist" and "No Country For Old Men" (though there he is mockingly cast as an inept tracker), Jones plays a consummate blood-hound, a man bred for hot pursuit. He is typically without attachments, stern but witty, authoritative and forever determined to apprehend his prey. "US Marshalls" sticks to this formula, but some solid action sequences, a brisk pace, many one-liners and some likable side characters ("Marshals" rightly recognises that the coolest characters in "The Fugitive" were Tommy Lee Jones and his motor-mouthed gang) keeps things fun."US Marshal's" best scene? A riff on Gene Hackman's Santa suit sequence in "The French Connection", in which Tommy Lee Jones conducts a pursuit and stakeout whilst dressed as a giant yellow chicken. Seriously.Incidentally, Wesley Snipes would find himself becoming a fugitive on the run in real life, the FBI currently tracking him for tax evasion. The film also stars Irene Jacob. What's she doing here? See her in three masterpieces: Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Red", "The Double Life of Veronique", and Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds".7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

This is literally the worst movie Jones has appeared in yet. That he could act in this civil rights garbage is dumbfounding. A very sad attempted redo of the great original movie starring Harrison Ford, The Fugitive. The movie is based on the premise that a black male (Smipes) would be wrongly accused by law enforcement of murder, perhaps a 1 in 500 million chance, usually they are doing a great job at being able to catch the many criminals, many of whom happen to be black. He is accused of murder, while in a hospital after a car accident. It also is very strange that they pair Snipes up with a recent White French immigrant woman, also unlikely and not something most would promote in an expensive studio feature movie.