U.S. Marshals

(Note: normally these reviews consist of 1 part movie review to 20 parts irrelevant personal reaction, thus earning the well-deserved annoyance of you all. But when I sat down to write this review, I realized that this review as it was shaping itself in my mind consisted of about 1 part movie review to 400 parts irrelevant personal reaction. Therefore I have shoved everything completely useless down after the grade, that you may feel better about ignoring it.)

"At least it's not called ‘The Fugitive 2' and isn't about Harrison Ford and some "no-armed man" five years later.

That was my original reaction to the idea of the movie "U.S. Marshals." But then I found out that the new fugitive was going to be (a) Wesley Snipes and (b) a government spy. "Oh yeah, right," I said, "and he's going to be smuggling nuclear weapons to Middle East terrorists, only he was set up." In fact, I was not planning to see this movie, except (a) I felt my role as action movie reviewer demanded it and (b) Irene Jacob (irrelevant personal detail below). "What role?" you may be asking. "Who's paying you?" No one yet, my friends, but in due time.

In any case, this is a reasonably competent action entertainment, if one ignores the "Danger: Incoming Clichés" signs scattered throughout the movie for the veteran action moviegoer to see just in time to trip on. (A few examples: Snipes' devoted girlfriend (Irene Jacob), Tommy Lee Jones's boss who warns him to stay within the boundaries of good conduct, tells him to take a vacation, and defends him to outsiders, and Tommy Lee Jones himself. Which of the four lines below can you actually hear Tommy Lee Jones saying:

1. "Now is the winter of our discontent."
2. "I love you desperately, more than any entity in the entire cosmos."
3. "Let's eat vegetarian from now on."
4. "Get yourself a Glock, hang up that sissy chrome gun."

In fact, I will go further and say that Tommy Lee Jones, currently, in terms of roles he plays, is basically Ahnold without the tag line. (He has seen better days in this regard, e.g., "Cobb," which I commend to all of you because it is about a Detroit Tiger. Go Tigers! Clark, Higginson, Hunter, Thompson!) The chases are well-executed (the spectacular one in the preview is by no means the only good confrontation scene, even between Snipes and Jones), the leads do their jobs with dedication and, in Jones's case, panache. The plot works reasonably well with the endless conventions it deploys. The only really original move is Robert Downey Jr. as the Sullen Gen-X Hero (for a good third of the movie he talks exactly like that kid on "King of the Hill" who says stuff like "Your house blew up"), but that blows up into action-movie-issue believability in a predictable way.

The main difference between this movie and "The Fugitive" is that the latter was extremely imaginative, while this movie takes the formula of that far superior film and stuffs cliches into it until it almost bursts. Since I find it hard to care too much about cliches, the question becomess: how easily can you be bought? For me, it's pretty damn easy, since I only paid $3 to see this (you know, at AMC, "There Is A Difference" - a four dollar difference) and I have low standards in general. You will have to decide for youself with the help of the following capsule guide:

Believability: Several gasp-inducingly stupid things here, most involving the presumption of death or submission during fights. In addition: how come one car gets stuck in midtown NYC traffic and the others don't, even though they're all coming from the same general area? Who has a helicopter ready at like fifteen minutes notice? How come, even though Snipes must be hitching rides with someone, they only find news of him once between Ohio and NYC? Why don't they have a tap on his girlfriend's phone instantaneously, instead of waiting for Snipes's second call? It's hard for any movie to be believable for long when it does so many things exactly the same as other movies like it and when it has a famous and fun pattern to follow for the first hour or so. (Also, who's right about how a prisoner transport plane works: this movie or "Con Air"? In "Con Air" they had to lock people down totally manually; in this movie it's semi-automated.) Well, it's more than that, now that I think about it. "The Fugitive" was such a believable movie that anything related to it and inferior looks that much more stupid.

Tension: Pretty good, except I was aware that my butt hurt. This informal measure of the tension a movie creates, called the "Posterior Pain Principle," has served me well. During "Tomorrow Never Dies," I was completely oblivious to the pain my ass was feeling until the movie ended. Same with "Face/Off." Here I noticed. Still, the confrontations just kept coming and didn't really lose their impact.

Action: If I see one more movie where someone misses someone else when they have a clear shot at 40 feet with a scoped automatic rifle for several seconds, I am going to start going to Jane Austen adaptations more frequently. Otherwise this was pretty good.

Attractive Man Count: Snipes, certainly. I think Robert Downey Jr. is supposed to be attractive but he's really not. Certainly he is quite convinced he's attractive, which may be what's putting me off. 1.

Attractive Woman Count: 1 1/2 (see below).

Overall Grade: B. Marhsal your resources to see this movie only if you are sure you can apprehend and subdue your brain at the door.

Now, the fun part:

1) Way before Kate Winslet, when I saw the movie "Red," I developed my first movie-starlet crush, which was Irene Jacob. This was probably partly because of the typical foreign-film strategy employed in that movie, which is to have the camera stare at her face until you were having trouble imaging your field of vision without her in it, which eventually sort of clubs your psyche into empathizing with her. To ensure that this technique is not terminally annoying, they cast women who are good-looking enough that the combined effect is one of truly mesmerizing gorgeousness. The French are particularly adept at this, which is one of the reasons I could put forth in favor of refraining from nuking their sorry frog asses. Note the word "could." So when I heard Irene was Wesley Snipes's girlfriend, I just had to go see this movie. Well, she's still beautiful (I hate using the word "beautiful," because it is used indiscriminately in our culture, but it applies here), but she's just a character, and not even a main one at that. She works at a damn Starbucks. The camera does not linger on her. It is disappointing, but at least I am not going to have to carry around two movie-starlet crushes for the next month or so. (This is how long I estimate Mademoiselle Winslet will take to exit my consciousness this time. "This time" refers to the fact that I read this Rolling Stone article wherein the interviewer related his impression that she was as proud of learning to slice meat really well at her day job in a deli when she was working on "Heavenly Creatures" as of any movie she had made. This means that she enjoys:

•machinery

•manual labor

•mastering repetitive, essentially pointless tasks

Sigh. Someday we'll be together. (Cue Supremes CD.))

1a) For those of you who were wondering, Nathalie Imbruglia wants really badly to be stared at by a French movie director-type camera and thus become gorgeous, and she sort of has the face for it. Someone should tell her, though, that (a) it takes a lot longer time than a music video's duration to accomplish this feat, and (b) French directors generally don't have the face square-up against the camera all the damn time while watching the face through a fish-eye lens. You cannot make up for the time deficiency by putting the thing really far out in front towards the audience like that, or, as Leo Durocher once said of a similar phenomenon (the high pop fly) in a different context (baseball), "Home run in an elevator shaft!"

I don't think I'll waste any more of anyone's time decoding that one.

2) I don't know about the rest of the United States Marshals Service, but the part I became acquainted with last summer is mainly concerned with pushing paper and financial instruments and mismanaging seized assets (this would be why it was called the Seized Assets Division). I wonder how Tommy Lee Jones would fit in in the Seized Assets Division: "Gentlemen, we have a fugitive asset on our hands. I want a hard-target search of every brokerage house, bank, S&L, stock exchange, and investment firm within 15 miles."

3) The thing about this movie that was really enjoyable for me is that I feel that now I have enough familarity with action movies to start earnest work on "Walther Lamm: Ass Demolisher," a fine parody feature film hopefully starring Ahnold and Diane Venora (in fact, she is named "Katerina" in the film, but essentially plays the same character from "The Jackal," which if you will remember I was extremely enamored of). This casting is not bloody likely, as is the chance of someone ever reading the screenplay if I finish it, and as is also the chance of me ever even finishing it. But hopefully a lot of amusing dross will come out of it (like maybe I'll finish the "A Brief History of Time 2: Downforce" parody I started to get my chops up to speed). "Last Action Hero," although horrendously underrated, just didn't end up doing the job, with all its metaphysical complexities that got in the way of good stupid juvenile humor. Make way for Walther.

That last prediction didn't happen. This whole review, I think, convinced me to not review in this style anymore. On the other hand, my later reviews still have all this stuff, but they also have a review of the actual movie, so maybe I didn't give the style up so much as augment it. Also, "U.S. Marshals" does not deserve a B; it is a baaaaaad film. It's about a D if you don't have a crush on Irene Jacob. I realize now the error of my youth in failing to correct for this.

Action Movies Home

Spam-O-Matic Home