U.S. Marshals (1998)

U.S. Marshals arrives five years after The Fugitive and carries itself like a film that inherited a franchise without inheriting its reasons. Tommy Lee Jones returns as Sam Gerard, the deputy marshal who once chased a doctor through Chicago, and here he chases a different man through a swamp, a cemetery, and a retirement home. The plane crash is expensive. The grain silo is loud. Stuart Baird directs with competence and no visible enthusiasm for anything beyond the next set piece.

Consider the social register. Wesley Snipes plays the fugitive, a former intelligence agent framed by a corrupt colleague, and LaTanya Richardson plays a deputy on Gerard's team. Both are Black, and neither fact is ever raised, examined, or asked to mean anything. This is representation by casting rather than by argument, which in 1998 was simply how a studio thriller was staffed. Kate Nelligan appears as Gerard's supervisor, described by at least one critic as tough but lovable, and she is exactly that and nothing more. The film holds no thesis about gender, race, or power. It holds a conspiracy about stolen intelligence files and a diplomat named Chen.

What remains is procedure. Gerard grumbles, the team banters, Robert Downey Jr. smirks in a role that will read differently to modern eyes, and a man is shot on a boat. There is no lesson, no reckoning, no moment where the audience is invited to examine its own assumptions. The villain is a bad agent, not a system. The ending is a toast to a dead colleague. It is a machine that runs, and it runs for two hours and eleven minutes, and then it stops.