I didn’t realize I was watching a sequel to The Fugitive until I saw him pull the Glock straight arm out of the chicken suit. I told myself, “That’s just like Tommy Lee in The Fugitive.” And Tommy Lee pulled the mask off his gallus facade, and all our favorite U.S. marshals—Renfro, Biggs, Newman—came out of the woodwork for a theatrical arrest. I was on Tubi, but I was living again in the world of the VHS tapes you find at a friend’s family beach house.
It hurts to say that I like the 1998 sequel U.S. Marshals better than The Fugitive, but that’s the truth. While Andrew Davis’ film demonstrates a mastery of the thriller genre that peaked in the 1990s, director Stuart Baird showed a banal competence in his staging of over-expensive set pieces and blisteringly unfunny quips. It’s the kind of film that’s made for the bargain bin, as opposed to the Academy; the one that has no pretense that it’s anything more than the trash that’s advertised on the cover.
U.S. Marshals picks up where The Fugitive left off, with an idiosyncratic crackpot team able to solve even the most complex and counterintuitive runway crimes. U.S. Marshals suffers from its plot being overly cliched and ridiculous, to the point where it’s not even worth focusing on. Twists and turns exist solely for set pieces and location-based spectacle. It’s not important why we’re watching a plane crash on a highway sink into a river, or how come a manhunt has to happen on boats in the bayou, or why Wesley Snipes is in that ridiculous wig. These things exist in the film not to build an internal narrative logic, but because it’s fun to watch—everything’s built around those moments that catch your eye while flipping TV channels.
One might be offended by the shameless, naked attention-grabbing that U.S. Marshals engages in (it has the thematic substance of a highway billboard), but these in accumulation present a strange kind of corporate charm. Plot doesn’t come from a screenwriter so much as it does a checklist—we need a Starbucks product placement, why not make Irène Jacob a barista for a too-long establishing scene? On paper, it should be a completely soulless production, and yet through the talent of those involved, it explodes off the screen.
U.S. Marshals is a product of an overactive, overeager 1990s cinema that was still running off the franchising boom of the 80s and yet realized that film itself would be getting sidestepped for other mediums of entertainment in the coming century, so it still attracted the best professionals on both sides of the camera. Every stunt and set piece is handmade with a sense for the environment at hand, and shot with too many camera angles to make sure the audience can pick up on just how expensive it is. And then, when everything dies down, the filmmakers take a helicopter out to show just how many cop cars and firetrucks and extras they can stack along a road while a crew excavates a fuselage out of a river.
And biggest of all are the stars on screen, the ones who can steal a scene from the biggest stunt or special effect. Jones is always bursting with life, but here is accompanied by a squad of stupidly fast-talking, hard-quipping cops who get their jokes from bubblegum wrappers—they should be insufferable and yet they’re stupidly delightful, no doubt because it’s fun to watch actors like Joe Pantoliano ham it up. Baird gives the actors the room to be explosive. Despite every obligatory gesture calling back to the acclaimed original, the actors still have their overlong Steadicam sequences to get weird, or their tightly-blocked group shots to bounce off each other, making each and every bit of casualness and posturing fresh and alive beyond any right it has to be.