Laurence Fishburne is a fine actor. He's got an Academy Award nomination on his resume (for best actor in What's Love Got to Do With It), as well as a Tony Award (for August Wilson's Two Trains Running). He's also turned in fine performances in Searching for Bobby Fischer and Kenneth Branagh's Othello, among other films.
All of which makes me wonder why he'd waste his enormous talent in a film like Fled, a movie that is, at its best, mediocre and, at its worst, laughably predictable and even insipid.
In the film, Fishburne plays a convict named Piper who ends up on a Georgia chain gang, handcuffed to a convicted computer hacker, Dodge (The Usual Suspect's Stephen Baldwin). When another convict goes berserk, stealing a guard's gun, and killing the guards and opening fire on prisoners as well, Piper and Dodge end up fleeing to save their own skins. They end up in Atlanta, where, at gun point, they force a woman named Cora (Desperado's Salma Hayek) to take them to her house where they can get out of their handcuffs and prison coveralls, and figure out how to retrieve $5 million that Dodge stole by hacking into the computer system of a multi-national corporation.
Their situation is complicated by the fact that the corporation whom Dodge robbed is actually a front for the Cuban mafia; while the mob wants its money, it's even more interested in a computer disk onto which Dodge downloaded information that can send the syndicate's head to jail.
Piper and Dodge find themselves, then, having to run not only from the police (primarily a cop named Gibson who originally arrested Dodge nine months earlier), but also from a relentless hitman the mob has hired to track them down, as well as a federal marshall who wants the disk as evidence in a federal hearing about the crime boss's activities.
Like a lot of recent action flicks, Fled doesn't have an original thread in its entire 105 minutes. In fact, it all seems borrowed from 1970s cop shows. Save for some gratuitous shots of topless women, we could just as well be watching a weekly episode of "Barnaby Jones" or "MacCloud" or "Kojak" as we are a mega-million dollar theatrical release with a big-name star. You've got a "break-the-rules-to-solve-the-case" cop (Gibson) with the stern police captain who suspends him for insubordination--and, of course, the rogue cop helps solve everything in the end. You've got the smooth crime boss who seems to hold all of his meetings on a yacht with bikini-clad women lounging around. You've got the ruthless hitman who shoots everyone You've got the crooked federal official who's in league with the crime boss. (Ho-hum.)
There are other problems with the film, problems that stretch even the most willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
Early on, for example, when Piper and Doge are running through woods, with cops and dogs hot on their heels, they continually trip over one another. At one point, Dodge says, "Wait a minute. We've got to find a rhythm." A rhythm, Piper asks. "Yeah," Dodge, says, "I was raised a ward of the state, in foster homes and I once had this caretaker who taught me that rhythm was important in life. In everything you do, you have to find the rhythm. When you make love, there's a rhythm. We have to find our rhythm." I'll give you a rhythm, Piper says, and whips out a nifty gold-plated harmonica, which he commences playing so that he and Piper can get in sync, and then off they go. (Excuse me? Two convicts under pursuit are going to stop while one of them tells the other one his life story, and the other one is going to play the harmonica, letting everyone within earshot know their position? I don't think so.)
A bit later, after Piper and Dodge kidnap Cora, and force her to take them home, they're not in her house for two minutes before she's flirting with Piper, unlocking their handcuffs (her ex-husband just happened to be a cop, who just happened to have left behind a set of handcuff keys that just happened to fit the handcuffs that Piper and Dodge just happened to be wearing), giving them clothes, falling in love with Piper. (Excuse me? Haven't these escaped convicts have just held a very large pistol to her head? I suppose the next thing hitting the bookstores will be the Fled Guide to Success in Romance Using Handguns.)
Laurence Fishburne deserves far better than this, and you know what? So do we.
So if you find yourself being drawn to see this film--even in a few months when it hits the video shelves for two-for-a-buck, do yourself a favor.
Flee.
by Joe Schuster
Back to the list of reviews.
Back to Joe Schuster's Home Page