Andrew Davis
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The scene may even be a nod to Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford’s standoff in The Fugitive, where Jones’s “I don’t care” to Ford’s claims of innocence was a ruthlessly existential statement.
Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the first two movies, lift most of this one from The Fugitive (1993), right down to the relationship between Neeson and the maverick lawman on his tail.
Instead of rescuing a family member from Albanian mobsters in yet another world capital, Bryan Mills—the throat-punching, elbow-chopping ex-CIA operative most people think of as simply “Liam Neeson”—finds himself framed for murder in L.A. It’s a conventional riff on The Fugitive, complete with Forest Whitaker in the Tommy Lee Jones role, but at least it’s tapping into a set of fears and fantasies—about divorce and being replaced by a step-parent—that are distinct from those of the original.
The lack of a central abduction may have been a conscious effort by Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen to break from routine, but this substituted plot invites easy comparison to the still-crackerjack thrills of 1993’s The Fugitive, with Forest Whitaker’s dogged detective Dotzler standing in for Tommy Lee Jones as Neeson scampers across Los Angeles in pursuit of his tormentors.
Things go largely according to plan from the jump, with a plot that provides very little in the surprise department, especially if you remember back to 1993 and The Fugitive .
So in Taken 3, we get to watch Bryan Mills try to save his own neck –in the style of The Fugitive’s Richard Kimble (although in comparison, Kimble comes across a lot smarter and more competent) as opposed to playing a heroic family man, which pretty much kills all the fun of the franchise’s previous two installments.
"The Fugitive," "The Bourne Identity," "North By Northwest," "The Manchurian Candidate."
Then there's the film's many obvious sources of inspiration, which include (but are not limited to) 2001, Blade Runner, Tron, Wargames, The Terminator, The Fugitive, the Bourne films, and Live Free or Die Hard.
The supporting cast (including Thornton, Michael Chiklis and Rosario Dawson) is made up of fine actors, but only Thornton gets any real snap and sizzle in his scenes; Thornton may be channeling Tommy Lee Jones's character from The Fugitive, but that at least makes it possible to hear cliché lines like "They've hacked into the power grid ..." without your wanting to actively fall asleep.
Billy Bob Thornton as Agent Thomas Morgan: The first half of the film, when Thornton is channeling Tommy Lee Jones from The Fugitive, it works, especially when he is barking out orders at his men.
Lin also borrows from Andrew Davis' classic "The Fugitive" - Dwayne Johnson turns up as a relentless, order-barking U.S. fed in Rio to find Diesel, leading to a massive bald-head-and-biceps smackdown.
They're pursued by Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), even more muscled and sweaty than Dom, and expressing a lack of concern for his prey's sort-of innocence far less wittily than Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive .
Both “What Lies Beneath” and “The Fugitive” are echoed as “Unknown” beats up on Neeson while he tries to clear his name.
Richard Kimble in “The Fugitive.”)
Think Under Siege or the first Die Hard with a bit of In the Line of Fire tossed in for good measure.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Shooter), Olympus is the action movie equivalent of a Frankenstein monster assembled from other movies with the main template being Under Siege, plus a dollop of attitude from Die Hard and an overall blow-things-to-hell ambiance from almost any Michael Bay movie from the last decade.
For example, “Under Siege” was “Die Hard on a Boat.”
The twists are a bit predictable, but the flick is still exciting and relatively fresh, even though it borrows from "The Net", "Total Recall", "The Fugitive", "The Firm", "The X-Files" and other paranoia-fueled thrillers.
From Cary Grant in "North By Northwest" and Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive," to John Travolta in "Blow Out," and Robert Redford headlining "Three Days of the Condor," watching these actors portraying men pushed to their limits has always thrilled moviegoers.
Reuniting for the first time since "Crimson Tide," Scott and Bruckheimer this time impose their ballistic style on the reliable old paranoid thriller, taking cues from films as diverse as "The Fugitive," "The Conversation," "North by Northwest" and even Wim Wenders' recent arthouse entry, "The End of Violence."
Although "Shooter" ably disguises itself as an action flick, there are far more layers to Mark Wahlberg and Antoine Fuqua's take on Hunter's premise than this kind of movie usually allows; "The Bourne Identity" is a good reference point, as is Harrison Ford's "The Fugitive."
With a ticking-clock-time's-running-out conceit, "The Next Three Days" is like "The Fugitive" crossed with a McRib Sandwich - a death-defying chase with a limited-time-only offer.
Call it “The Fugitive” with more ambiguity but a lot less excitement.
The buzz: Writer-director Paul Haggis (“In the Valley of Elah,” “Crash”) is working from a 2008 French film but also recalls “The Fugitive” and “Taken.”
There's The Fugitive, North by Northwest, and-- oh, right-- The Running Man.
Andrew Davis was fired a couple of weeks into production and replaced by Starsky himself, Paul Michael Glaser (Davis would go on to make a slightly more notable man-on-the-run story a few years later in The Fugitive)…
…but started with Schwarzenegger as the lead and Andrew Davis as director (“The Fugitive,” 1993)…
With Richard Kimble in The Fugitive we were clued into his innocence immediately.
So, yes, the movie is part “The Fugitive.’’
Throw in scenes directly lifted from or inspired by pictures such as "The Mummy," "The Fugitive," "Event Horizon" and plenty of others, and the result is a film that's most notable for reminding viewers of how such scenes were better in the original films.
Consider his virtuoso opening chase sequence, which after the train crash leads to a series of drainage tunnels (echoes here of " The Third Man ") and finally to a spectacular dam, where Kimble risks death for a chance at freedom, and dives into the cascading waters in a moment that can only be called Wagnerian.
We’re introduced to Michael Myers in a psychiatric facility, about to board a ridiculously old and lightly guarded prison bus; it looks like an earlier model than the one Harrison Ford escaped from in “The Fugitive” in 1993.
It’s a bit like The Fugitive, if Harrison Ford had super-powered backup and the man with one arm was the one trying to prove his innocence.
Wicked: For Good (2025)
Directed by Jon M. Chu
influenced by Holes (2003), The Fugitive (1993)
Themes Plot
If Holes was able to teach an entire generation about the prison industrial complex, For Good should be able to make the point that fascism is bad.
…hunting Elphaba like Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugitive,” if Tommy Lee Jones secretly thought Harrison Ford was hot…
When a critic wistfully refers to a movie like The Fugitive or The Bourne Identity as “good old-fashioned entertainment,” there’s a good chance that this is the movie they recall.
Like Hitchcock's "North By Northwest," which involved Cary Grant in a similar situation, "The Fugitive" pits a blameless, everyday man against the forces of both good and evil, obliging him to survive by his wits alone.
It's more than a little eccentric to begin with to make audio-showpiece discs of three films that carry a mono surround signal; odder still is the noninclusion of Speed between the two lesser attempts at turning Reeves into an action hero that preceded and followed it, Point Break and Chain Reaction, respectively.
Mad Men star Jon Hamm rounds out the strong cast as the skilled yet frustrated FBI Agent Frawley, but he is no Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.
Part of that's because of the rather poorly written role, but also due to the way Chris Cooper ("The Patriot," "American Beauty") overacts a bit too much, as well as his character not being as actively involved in the hunt as was the case with Tommy Lee Jones' character in "The Fugitive."
The Bourne Identity is essentially an extended chase movie, like The Fugitive, except that in this movie the Tommy Lee Jones figure (a malevolent Chris Cooper) isn’t a U.S. Marshall bent on capturing his target, but a shady CIA operative who wants to have him killed.
That’s right – Apocalypto, for all its exacting attention to period detail, is at heart something of an extravagantly staged chase flick, one in which Jaguar, pursued while trying to return to the pregnant wife and child he hid from his enemies at the bottom of a deep hole, must leap off a waterfall to escape his adversaries à la The Fugitive, and later, must defeat the villains’ psycho second-in-command with a super-cool Matrix-y move shot in slow-motion.