Fled

Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Stephen Baldwin, Salma Hayek, Will Patton, Robert John Burke, Robert Hooks, Victor Rivers, David Dukes, Ken Jenkins, Bill Bellamy
Directed by: Kevin Hooks
Rating: R
Genre: Action, Adventure
1996

Times Seen:
Tim: 2

Summary: Two prisoners (Laurence Fishburne, Stephen Baldwin) flee from prison and get caught up in a deadly chase involving the mafia, the police, and federal marshals.

Review:
Tim: Fled isn't a good movie. It's probably best to establish that from the get go. It's not a terrible movie, but it gets progressively worse as you watch it. It's one of those generic, forgettable action movies from the 1990s. It has some worthwhile elements, but the script and the direction are a mess. It ends up being only mildly entertaining, but also illogical and oftentimes nonsensical. It's one of those movies you don't feel good about having seen.

The biggest appeal is probably the pairing of Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin. When Baldwin is involved in a film's biggest strength, you know something has gone wrong. To be fair, Baldwin's not terrible in the movie. He's clearly a bad actor, though- and whenever he's called upon to do too much, his lack of talent shows. When his dialogue is kept to a minimum, he's not bad. Unfortunately, the film called upon him to do too much, which hurts the film. Fishburne is a much better actor, although this isn't a great role. Still, he brings his talent to the part. The writing absolutely hurts him, so he does seem silly from time to time, but he's better than Baldwin. There's some enjoyment to be had at how much these two hate each other (and the gag is that they're chained together!) but this is often taken to too much of an extreme. It represents the worst of the 90s machismo that just looks juvenile these days.

Salma Hayek gives a decent supporting performance. Her acting was good, but her character's actions make so little sense that it was a bit maddening. I loved the casting of Will Patton. I really like Patton and he brought some credibility to the film with his solid performance. It felt like Patton really put in the effort and the movie is better because of his performance. Although I liked Fishburne's performance, Patton is really the highlight of the film.

The story starts out decently enough. After a bloody attack by prisoners on the guards watching over them, two prisoners chained together make a hasty escape. They don't like each other, but are chained together. At this point, I enjoyed the movie. This is a solid premise and it was fun watching them evade capture while chained together. The early part of this film works quite well. When you start learning more about the events that are behind their escape, things start falling apart. It's a somewhat convoluted story that truly isn't very interesting at all. There's a floppy disk, some mafia people, corrupt law enforcement people, honest cops, some trial thing, a hacker. It all gets thrown up on the screen and not a lot of it makes a lot of sense. The movie isn't very compelling and the story isn't crystal clear, so it asks a lot of the audience to stay focused on what is happening. Quite a bit of this doesn't make a lot of logical sense, which furthers alienates the audience. What starts out as a cool and simple premise- two chained prisoners on the run- becomes this convoluted conspiracy that is pretty boring. The action scenes towards the end push the limits of our credulity as well.

I wanted to like Fled but I simply couldn't. I had to laugh at the insistence of using fled in a way that made no sense. "We gotta fled!" Might sound cool, but it's so grammatically incorrect that it had me rolling my eyes. It was certainly supposed to be a cool tagline, but it was stupid. This movie does a few things right and a whole lot of things wrong.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 5.5



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