"The Fugitive" from 1993 was bound to be a tough act to follow. Even so, it doesn't come as any surprise that a follow-up film was commissioned. Tommy Lee Jones returns to the role which earnt him the oscar for best supporting actor and this time, he is up against political opposition as well as everything else. "U.S Marshals" has Sam Gérard (Jones) and his team of fellow police officers on the trail of another wanted fugitive (played by action hero Wesley Snipes). The film doesn't exactly thrill or grip its audience in the way that "The Fugitive" does and just cruises along in middle gear. There is still a fair degree of incident and a few action sequences which should please the fans but that's about all. Tommy Lee Jones is the one to watch above all but Wesley Snipes and Robert Downey Jr provide great support. Jones is once again provided with some effective one-liners in his scenes with the other police officer actors. The scene where Snipes makes good his escape from the plane wreck is very capably handled but the plot becomes slightly difficult to follow afterwards. This is due to too much going on at the same time and it leads to confusion. Not a bad film but no masterpiece.

Quite what Wesley Snipes' character was wanted for,I lost interest in,as the usual mix of clichés reeled off.Tommy Lee Jones as the(stifles yawn)cavalier and maverick officer who doesn't give a stuff about authority. Kate Nelligan ,who,in a previous existence was an classical actress but here she's a glamorous superior officer who appears magically out of various choppers into these danger zones ,immaculately besuited as if she's come out of an important meeting and she's not best pleased.She's permanently down on him and of course there's sexual tension between them.Godammit ,she loves the guy! Patrick Formaldahide,another Brit with an accent,introducing inter-departmental rivalry,of course, placing one of his officers with Jones who,naturally,hates him because producers of this kind of thing have to have tension all the time ,you understand.On and on it went.We had Jones' loyal team whooping it up in a bar and watching themselves on TV.Buds all round,you guys! An utterly ridiculous plane crash from which somehow Snipes manages to escape.An episode in a swamp where Snipes gets away from about 6 people by holding up the ,you guessed it, rival officer. I confess to giving up at the halfway point...can you blame me?

I was never much interested in watching this spin off of The Fugitive. What attracted me to The Fugitive was Richard Kimble's story fleshed up by Harrison Ford and truckloads of action. Tommy Lee Jones as Sam Gerard stood out and was essential to the overall balance but you would not say that this supporting character was more interesting than the fugitive.Action packed as it is US Marshals lacks a deeper characterisation of Gerard. His team, his temper, his buoyancy, his tidy boss... these are nice touches but don't really build something more than the character we already saw in the previous movie.You can take the two impressive action sequences apart and they just look like another blockbuster's tour de force. In the course of the movie they are not set up as a tension peak, they mostly happen as scripted. Surely there are too many nice/interesting characters to follow (Tommy Lee Jones and 2-3 prominent members of his team, Robert Downey Jr, Wesley Snipes and his lover Irène Jacob) so the editing rhythm is bogged down. The pace is simply not as fast as it should be for action to play to the max.Another big flaw is the 'New Fugitive' character arc: we don't know him from the get-go - whereas the premise of the original Fugitive was about an innocent man accused of his wife's murder and relentlessly tracked down - and then new elements are added that don't draw a clear picture of who he is - and if he is really innocent ! Most notably it is clear soon enough that he is not just your average man: hence empathy and rooting for him can never reach the required level for suspension of disbelief to work (I am especially thinking of the graveyard shooting, a sequence setup which looks blatantly haphazard for such big professional boys).Too bad they rushed such a script into production to poach on the Fugitive real-estate. They didn't need to have another nice innocent fugitive - especially given this protracted macguffin of a plot. Sam Gerard should have been the sole hero, attempting to stop more than a prisoner on the loose, and we should have had a better insight into the man's soul.

Capitalizing on the success that Tommy Lee Jones scored in The Fugitive, his character of Marshal Sam Gerard was given the lead in US Marshals where he is once again going after an innocent man. In this case Jones's target is Wesley Snipes who is not only an accused murderer of two agents, but he's accused of treason as well, passing secrets to the People's Republic of China.Tommy Lee Jones won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Fugitive, but he's not doing anything remotely reaching Oscar contention in US Marshals. It's a hastily and poorly written script with a lot of nice action sequences to cover that up. The airplane crash sequence where Snipes escapes from Jones's custody is well done as is his escape from an old age home on to the roof of a moving subway.As we know early on that Snipes is innocent, I'm here to tell you that the guilty party stands out like a sore thumb. A five year old child could tell you who the real bad guy and traitor is.Jones, Snipes and the rest of the cast do a workmanlike job. But this one is for easy to please action/adventure fans.