The most famous sequence in The Fugitive, Andrew Davis’s 1993 thriller that became a classic, is the first confrontation between the wrong man (played by Harrison Ford) and the U.S. Marshal, who doesn’t care whether or not Ford killed his wife, played with brilliant ambivalence by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones’ marshal has caught up to Ford in the bowels of an Illinois dam, chasing him to the end of the line, where the water spills out to the sunken river below. Facing either the gun or gas chamber, Ford makes the jump, going “Peter Pan” over the edge and disappearing to the water beneath. The sequence is perfect 1990s Hollywood, and was immortalized a year after its premiere when Bart Simpson framed his friend Milhouse on America’s Most Wanted.
The spectacle of the moment’s clear, but what makes the movie last forever, to me, is the way Tommy Lee Jones moves. After an initial scuffle, where Ford apprehends Jones’ gun and runs off, Jones reaches for a backup. He pulls the backup pistol from his side, holding his arm almost straight with his shoulder at a 45 degree angle to his torso. The action allows for plenty of separation within the frame, allowing Jones’ body to encompass more of the image, and also relays a caution and certainty for Jones' character. He’s not immediately pointing his gun forward ready to shoot, he’s gingerly moving in a way that can provide surrender as quick as action, yet the whole motion advances slowly. He’s cautious and calculated, avoiding excessive risk but also has an animalistic quality to how he can trick his prey into a sense of ease.
The Fugitive is of a strain of Tommy Lee Jones performances that aren’t seen in his work now, and not often remembered. His role as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men has taken over the image of Jones as this specific type of old, wise figure, one who prefers to be capable with his mind rather than a gun. But the Jones of before was often much stranger: not just both the intellectual and the assassin, but one that has a certain superiority complex around him.
Take his first scene in The Fugitive, for instance. Jones and his team of marshals arrive on the scene of an overturned prison transport and a wrecked train to see a shitty sheriff interrogating the guard, who claims all the prisoners must’ve died in the crash. “Oh wow, gee whiz, look here!” Jones exclaims with a bizarre and off-putting sarcasm as one of his men hands him a set of empty chains. “You know, we’re always fascinated when we find leg irons with no legs in ‘em,” Jones says while waving them in the guard’s face before unceremoniously dropping them on the ground. There’s a bravado written into the script, but Jones brings it alive with a twitchy swagger, a kind of muted thud.
The Fugitive isn’t the only time that Davis let Jones get unleashed; he also plays a delightfully deranged killer in the late-Cold War thriller The Package, opposite the indomitable Gene Hackman. Almost any competent actor in Hollywood could pick up the material that Jones is handed here and pull off the cold villainy, but what Jones does is approach the role with such a bursting affect, one that seems to chew up the script and spit it back out in disgust of the motions he knows he’s going through. Anything mechanical Jones masticates, going through the motions because he has to, and pointing out to everyone within ear shot that that’s what he’s doing. And in doing so, he invites the audience to follow him, with any moment of disbelief or disaffection drawing attention closer to his stranger motions, his tics and failings—Jones is able to make himself seem more human by pointing out just how good he is at what he does.