The Fugitive (1993)

Director: Andrew Davis

Cast: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Andreas Katsulas*

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: What’s not to like? The plot is a tightly-wound tension deliver device that were a hallmark of Davis’ action films in the 90s. In an era where plenty of TV shows from the 60s were being re-created for the big screen, this could have been a real chore to sit through, but it isn’t. If you have a problem with some of the light implausibilities, then action thrillers might not be your thing. It’s also a weird twist of Hollywood fate that Davis hasn’t made a dozen more films in the last thirty years that were unassailably big hits. The film is really that good.

But ;et’s look at that cast again. Throw in Joe Pantoliano, and Julianne Moore, and this thing fills out way beyond its perfectly cast two leads. Never mind that I just happened to watch The Living Daylights (1987) early today, so I’ve accidentally done a “surprise, Jeroen Krabbé ism’t your friend, he’s the bad guy” double-feature.

But let’s look at the two leads. Jones brings his magnetic minimalism to full bore here, and the film would suffer greatly if there was any point in time when Gerard would be an antagonist and not an adversary for Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble. Ford himself is at the height of his movie star powers, equal parts charming and disarming, and never not inspiring every inch of sympathy he can from the audience, and all by fully using the occasionally smirking, occasionally frowning countenance that made him a household name. But more importantly than that, this is a visceral performance from Ford. Forgoing just the chase amidst Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade (which makes the parade sequence in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) look all the more like a typical latter-day Lucasfilm CGI-fest) but As Ford is tossed around, and forced through raging waters in his escape attempts, it’s hard to think that this will be the guy who will quickly spend about twenty years sleep-walking through every film to which he forgot to say no.

Babylon 5: In The Beginning (1998)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The Babylon 5 movies were an interesting thing. After the series moved to TNT, we got four full fledged-movies aired over the course of the last year of the series. Although, for my money, the story was pretty much told in the first four years, so everything that aired on TNT felt like wheel spinning. And yet, I can’t help but think of both this movie and Babylon 5 - A Call to Arms (1999)—both aired as New Year’s events—as the first movies released in those formative years in my life.

Did I Like It: The movie has a series of less than enviable tasks. First, it launches a new era for the show which, as I mentioned above, were already behind them. It needs to weave together a complex mythology into an exciting story on its own rights. It also needs to bring in a new audience, so as to justify TNT’s enormous expense.

In case you’re wondering, it succeeds mildly in those earlier tasks, while utterly failing as the list goes on. Built out of a mishmash of flashbacks from previous episodes and some new material, the story never gels into a coherent narrative. There are moments where it transcends its restrictions, mainly surrounding the framing device in the future with Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik). Still, the productions collective budget on hair dye in pursuit of convincing everyone the story takes place nearly fifteen years prior to the main storyline must have been staggering.

It does launch a new era for the series, but that new era underlines how, when the Prime Time Entertainment Network was collapsing in on itself and the story rushed to its natural and satisfying conclusion a year ahead of schedule. Babylon 5 has not been the same since the end of the fourth season when we saw humans a million years hence reaching their ultimate destiny.

And, too, it failed to pull in a new audience. Utterly, so, as it would turn out. It had no hope of doing so, as bringing in new people to a show whose story is already done appears to have been a fool’s errand in retrospect. The network quickly gave in to buyer’s remorse, and the future this movie promised was done within a year, and the series relegated to DVD sets for all time within another year.