He sneaks into an office and searches a prosthetics database for one-armed men. Only five results. One of them has GOT to be Helen’s murderer. Are you sure this is how computers work? What if the murderer got his prosthetic arm at a different hospital? Or not in Chicago? What if you remembered his number of arms wrong? Or which arm it was?
On his way out, he encounters an influx of trauma patients to the ER. There has been a school bus crash. Richard jumps in to help because even though he absolutely needs to get the heck out of there, his perfect heart won’t let him! Dr. Julianne Moore conscripts him to bring a kid down to observation room 2, and on the way, Richard sneaks a cheeky look at the film and sees that he’s been misdiagnosed. He changes the kid’s chart, saving his damn life. Julianne Moore notices the janitor changing the chart and calls for security because normally janitors are not preeminent vascular surgeons in disguise, and I get that. Richard runs away.
Skreeeet! Here comes Jones!
GODDAMN, THIS MOVIE’S GOOD. You know, I approached this essay from the semi-joking, hyperbolic premise that The Fugitive is the best movie ever made, and assumed I was setting myself up for disappointment. But then it turned out that I was right and it’s literally true! The Fugitive IS the best movie ever made! I set myself up for appointment!!!!
Tommy talks to Julianne Moore about the mysterious janitor who changed the charts.
Tommy: How’s the boy doing?
Jules: He saved his life.
This just isn’t adding up for Tom-Tom. “What I can’t figure is the place is crawling with cops, everybody’s looking for Richard Kimble, so why would the guy be stupid enough to come hang out in a trauma ward, pretending like he’s Mother Teresa?”
THEN A ONE-ARMED GUY GOES BY and he’s like KABOIIIIIING! Oh yeah! Richard said a one-armed man killed his wife, so now he is trying to find the one-armed man! Why would a guy who killed his wife go to so much risk and trouble trying to track down a fictional man he made up? He wouldn’t, dumbass! Now Tommy is looking for the one-armed man too. That lil bitch doesn’t stand a chance!
Kimble goes to the jail to visit Clive Driscoll, one of the one-armed men from the one-armed computer. When he gets there he realizes that Clive Driscoll is a Black person, and he definitely remembers Helen being murdered by a one-armed white. Wrong guy! Richard hops up to leave so he can move on to the next guy on his one-armed list. Clive Driscoll doesn’t care that they don’t know each other, though—he wants to chat! “Ain’t no cable in this damn place!” But Richard (who is stressed out about being a fugitive in a building full of law enforcement I guess yeah whatever) is like, “Sorry, bye,” and leaves Clive disappointed and lonely, right at the moment when his wounded heart thought he finally had a visitor. This is Richard’s only flaw as a man.
Tommy Jones gets to the jail just as Richard is exiting and they do a chase. To buy some time, Richard yells, “There’s a man waving a gun and screaming!” so the cops tackle Tommy instead of him. This is a good prank that you should try on your little brother the next time he’s chasing you with a gun.
Richard escapes outside into the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is the one where they dye the Chicago River green, and this is unrelated to the movie but it seems like they shouldn’t do that. Richard steals a green bowler hat from some idiot and joins the parade. He is having a blast.
He sneaks into the house of another one-armed man from his list, and bazinga, it’s a spicy meatball. This is the guy. Not only that, but there are a bunch of pics of this dickhead hanging out with Richard’s two best friends, Lenz and a big fish, without Richard! He doesn’t let the hurt show on his face, but you know it stings. One time in middle school, my three best friends all went trick-or-treating together as Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow, and they didn’t invite me, even though they didn’t even have a lion. And then, crazy story, they murdered my wife!
Turns out, the one-armed man, Sykes, is on the payroll of Devlin MacGregor Pharmaceuticals, which is just about to launch a new drug called Provasic. VERY INTERESTING. Richard calls up Tommy. “I am trying to solve a puzzle and I just found a big piece.”
Back when he was a doctor and not a doctor/fugitive, Richard found out that Provasic caused liver damage and he told everyone. He told Chuck. He told Lenz. He told the big fish. He told the mayor of the Munchkin City. So why was Devlin MacGregor releasing Provasic to the public anyway? How did it get approved by the FDA? Richard goes back to the hospital and gets the old Provasic-damaged liver samples from his friend in the samples basement. He takes them to lanky cherub Jane Lynch, who discovers, “not only did they all come from healthy livers, they all came from the same liver.” DANG! That’s not how liver samples are supposed to work! Somebody must have switched the fucked-up samples with healthy samples so that Devlin MacGregor could make $7.5 billion in net sales last year alone! (Only a hunch, but maybe Devlin MacGregor?)
Co-inka-dinka, Richard runs into Sykes on the street and Sykes is like, “Bad news, Mr. Kimble! My gun works on husbands too!” They fight on a train and Sykes shoots a train cop, but ultimately Richard wins and handcuffs Sykes to the train. Then he says one of those zingers that were cool as hell in the ’90s: “You missed your stop.” It’s so badass that Sykes’s other arm falls off.
In another weird coincidence, Devlin MacGregor is having a Provasic gala literally right now. Richard toots over there. Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.
Richard gets to the gala and who’s up there at the podium pampering Provasic’s dong? Who just got appointed to the board of directors of Devlin MacGregor?? Wow, it’s only CHUCK! Richard’s “loyal” and “European” “best friend” who told Tommy Jones earlier that Richard is an innocent man. I guess he would know, if you know what I mean.
This bitch is literally like, “Provasic is remarkably effective and has no side effects whatsoever.” Excuse me??? Richard can’t take it and he recites the verse for which he became poet laureate of Chicago:
You almost got away with it, didn’t you? I know all about it, I can prove it!
You changed the samples,
didn’t you?
You switched the samples after Lenz
died!
Haha, Richard,
I’m sorry, I’m in the middle
of this speech.
After Lenz died, you were the only one who had the access.
You switched the samples
And the pathology report!
He falsified
his
research!
Did you kill Lenz too?
So Devlin MacGregor could give you
[witheringly] PROVASIC.
Chuck is like, “Heh-heh, uh, hey, come back to the greenroom with me, Ricardo, heh-heh-heh,” then as soon as they get back there he’s like, U CANNOT DEFEAT ME I HAVE THE POWER OF PROVASIC!!!!! They fight and Richard chases Chuck up to the roof. They fall through a skylight and end up in the hotel’s laundry dungeon. At this point, Tommy and Joey Pants show up (I shouldn’t have to tell you that Joey Pants is in this movie—you should always assume), and everyone is chasing one another around and around.
I was going to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore, where the last thirty minutes is just one continuous incredible chase, except they do, all the time, but they make it all CGI so it’s impossible to care about. Who cares about a drawing of a very fast exploding truck that a computer made? Not me! I care about Joey Pants getting bonked in his actual head with an actual steel beam on a zip line that is somehow an integral part of washing hotel sheets! Real cinema!