The Fugitive: Special Edition (1993)

When Dr. Richard Kimble arrives home one evening to see his beautiful wife Helen he is confronted by a one armed man. After a brief struggle the man escapes and Richard, to his horror, discovers that his wife is lying dead in the bedroom. However, during the struggle with her attacker Helen managed to phone the police and in her attempt to call to Richard mentions his name to the police officer on the other end of the line.

Using this evidence against him, and the fact that Helen is very wealthy and Richard is the sole inheritor, the police can find no other evidence to point to this mysterious one arm man and charge Richard with her murder. At his trail the jury agree and the judge sentences Richard to death by lethal injection.

However, fate is on Richard's side when the prison bus taking him and a number of others to the detention centre is involved in an escape plot. Unfortunately, the bus crashes onto a railway line and in the ensuing melee Richard escapes and starts his mission to find the real killers whilst avoiding the never ending mission of Marshall Samuel Gerard to get his man.

The picture is reasonable enough with an average bit-rate throughout the film. The nighttime scenes were certainly impressive with a high amount of detail, but the daytime scenes seemed to be a little washed out with too much contrast, although the picture did retain a fair amount of detail and colour and certainly didn't exhibit any signs of artifacting or outlining.

The sound is excellent with plentiful use of the surround channels and a crisp and clear dialogue in the centre channel throughout the film. However, it is the train crash at the beginning which truly tests your system to the fullest with crashing, smashing and explosions all around you. The rear channel is hardly ever idle with plenty of ambient sounds and along with the superbly suspenseful soundtrack makes it worth the purchase of the disc alone.

This "Special Edition" adds a few welcome extras to the disc, but frankly these should have been supplied in the first place. The extras below make look extensive but in reality they are not with the two documentaries split into two to fill out the disc a bit. The commentary is reasonable enough but yet again I don't know why Tommy Lee Jones bothered. Similar to his Men in Black commentary, most of his comments came from being prompted and tended to just be "Yeah" and "A-ha".

Although the menu is scored, and similar to the original version, the menu remains static and boring. This disc definitely stinks of a money making exercise with the minimum amount of effort from Warner. If you don't already own this disc then it is a worth while purchase as it is certainly one of the best films of the nineties. However, if you already own the original then it would be hard to recommend buying this edition.