Few program concepts have ever been so ideally suited to series TV as was that of The Fugitive, the 1963-67 ABC series about the perpetual escape of a Midwestern doctor who, after being unjustly convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death, was accidentally freed when the train he was riding to prison derailed. Nor have many TV actors ever been so well suited to their roles as David Janssen, master of the furtive look and embattled expression, was to play Richard Kimble, the doc on the lam.
This movie, however, suffers too much by invidious comparison. While it is often a strikingly tense, absorbing drama with lots of flash and scale in its action, it doesn't have time to create the new relationships and (sometimes) romances for Kimble that enlivened the series.
Ford is pretty much on his own; his capacity to be ingratiating hasn't been tested this severely since 1979's The Frisco Kid. Ward appears in flashbacks as his murdered wife, but nobody new comes into his life. (Krabbe plays an old medical colleague.) Jones, Hollywood's current all-purpose villain, takes on Barry Morse's TV role as Gerard, the cop obsessed with recapturing Kimble, although he's now a deputy U.S. marshal, not a local type. Morse did a better job of suggesting that Gerard had turned a professional duty into a vendetta. But screenwriters Jeb Stuart and David Twohy seem less concerned with character than with setting up director Andrew Davis for the action scenes with which he is most comfortable.
Their script also convolutes the plot. No longer is Mrs. Kimble's murder a simple piece of random violence committed by the elusive one-armed man whom Janssen chased. Now Dr. Kimble, a Chicago "vascular surgeon," has been framed as part of a corporate conspiracy to market a drug he knows has dangerous side effects. The film treats this profoundly preposterous plot as if it were a serious idea.
The Fugitive demands not only a mega-suspension of disbelief but also a convenient loss of memory. Pretending this movie is an original notion is the best way to get through it feeling entertained. (PG-13)
Max Pomeranc, Ben Kingsley, Joan Allen, Laurence Fishburne, Joe Mantegna
Chess fanatics are the obvious targets for this tabletop Rookie of the Year, but anyone obsessed with obsession will do. The film has only a peripheral, albeit lionizing, interest in Fischer, the boorish prodigy who became the first American to win the world chess championship in 1972, then forfeited the title three years later by not showing up to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. (Fischer surfaced last fall to play a pointless exhibition match against Boris Spassky.)
Fischer does appear in news clips, but the film's focus is Josh Waitzkin, a Manhattan 7-year-old who became a youth champion (and is, at 16, still the highest-ranking U.S. player younger than 18) after being turned on to chess by the hustlers he saw playing speed chess on tables in the city's parks.
Pomeranc, 8, himself a nationally ranked chess player, plays Waitzkin with an understanding of the single-mindedness that kids need to become stars. Still, he keeps a cute-kid part of him alive. Kingsley, as Bruce Pandolfini, a former Fischer mentor who coaches Waitzkin, is strangely dispassionate. (If Gandhi had been this phlegmatic, India would still be a colony.) Fishburne has a thin role as the street-chess hustler who becomes Waitzkin's buddy, and Mantegna is in characteristic nonstop-grimace mode as Josh's lather, Fred (on whose book the film is based). Allen has little to do as the boy's passive mom. And everyone is overshadowed by Michael Nir-enberg, 9, who displays a sinister, future-villain grace as the boy who becomes Josh's biggest rival.
Director Steven Zaillian doesn't get much tension out of their final showdown. But he does sketch a convincing portrait of how a hobby can turn into a fixation. (PG)
Rubert Downey Jr., Kyra Sedgwick, Charles Crodin, Tom Sizemore, Elisabeth Shue, AIfre Woodard
Think Herman's Head. Think Topper. Think Here Comes Mr. Jordan or Heaven Can Wait. Think A Gay Named Joe, Always or Ghost. Best of all, think of doing something other than wasting your time on this marsh-mallow-brained fantasy romance.
Its gauzy premise is that when a car collides with a San Francisco city bus, a pregnant woman in the auto instantaneously gives birth to a son whose soul is merged with the ghosts of four bus riders (Sedgwick, Grodin, Sizemore and Woodard) killed in the crash. The boy, who grows up to be Downey, can see and hear the ghosts, but nobody else can, except, alas, the audience. (The ghosts have been allowed to keep contact with life to enable them to take care of crucial unfinished business they left behind when they were killed in the crash; Sizemore, for instance, is a cheap crook who had promised to return valuable stamps he had stolen from a 10-year-old boy.)
The ghosts meddle on and off in the boy's life, returning when he's about 30 to flit around in the middle of his romance with Shue. Downey early on exhausts his repertoire of acting moves: looking blank and dead-eyed and mincing about in semidrag mode. Old pro Grodin makes his trademark forlorn gaze generate laughs even when the script has the cast milling around in pathetic, go-nowhere scenes. The others are simply dead-ended. (PG-13)
Joseph Lindsey, Patrick McGaw, Mira Sorvino, Steve Parlavecehio
Two aging Jewish gangsters, now semilegitimate businessmen and big shots in suburban bong Island, are shaking their heads in bewildered disgust at the disrespect shown them by the young bloods coming up through the ranks. "Who are these kids?" the top geezer wonders. "They're us, all over again," his sidekick tells him.
"These kids" are the disaffected, aimless, morally bereft group of twentysomethings who populate this taut little stinger of a movie, which marks the highly promising debut of director-screenwriter Rob Weiss. Amongst Friends is about a trio of criminally inclined pals, children of privilege who earn pocket money with small-time hustles while always looking for the big score that will get them out of their parents' houses and into apartments of their own. When one of the buddies goes after another's girl and one of their heists goes awry, old loyalties begin to fray with tragic consequences.
If all this sounds like Mean Streets in suburbia, that's indeed how it plays and, just like Martin Scorsese's 1973 breakthrough film, Friends has style and energy to spare, a thick coating of romantic doom and a talented cast of newcomers. (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Leah Rozan.
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