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It is usually a bad sign if one can lop the first twenty minutes off of a movie and not noticeably harm the picture. Such is the case with this sequel to The Fugitive. There is a long sequence at the beginning of the movie in which Tommy Lee Jones's crack team of marshalls busts a family of criminals that is completely superfluous, including a superfluous bar scene and a superfluous row with Jones's by-the-book superior. One can actually see the filmmakers thinking too hard about the movie in this sequence, wondering how to get Jones on the same plane as Wesley Snipes when all they really need to do is place them on the plane while the credits roll.

The whole movie is like this.

U. S. Marshalls clocks in at about two hours and ten minutes. It could clock in at 93 minutes without losing anything. I won't belabor the plot here--it suffices to say that this is a sequel to The Fugitive--but there are gaps in logic here that require elaboration: one key plot point turns on the notion that poor heroin-addicted Robert Downey Jr. can kick the crap out of athletic bad-ass Snipes. I doubt anyone in the audience buys into this. It also deliberately manouvers Snipes to the top of a building in order to have him stage an escape Jackie Chan might envy. It's main set pieces ape either its predecessor or other better action pictures like Southern Comfort. This isn't a total wreck, really. It's a pretty average movie enlivened by Jones in a role he seems to have been born to play. But it is a movie that cries out for a film editor and a director who both realize that just because it might be in the script, you don't really have to keep it.