The Fugitive

The Fugitive is a relentless chase film elevated by two of the finest performances in action cinema history. Harrison Ford plays Dr. Richard Kimble, a surgeon wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder who escapes a prison transport and sets out to find the real killer. Tommy Lee Jones is Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard, the brilliant, sardonic lawman tasked with hunting him down. The genius of the film is that both men are sympathetic — you root for Kimble to prove his innocence and you root for Gerard to do his job.

Andrew Davis stages the action with a documentary-like immediacy. The train crash is one of the great practical effects sequences in cinema — a real locomotive was derailed into a real bus, and the footage is viscerally terrifying. The dam jump, the St. Patrick’s Day parade chase, the hospital sequence where Kimble impersonates a janitor — every set piece raises the stakes while maintaining the film’s grounded reality.

Tommy Lee Jones won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the film earned $368 million on a $44 million budget. It is the definitive adaptation of a TV series, the best wrongful-accusation thriller ever made, and proof that Harrison Ford at his peak was the most reliable action star in Hollywood.