Based on the bestselling sci-fi series of the same name, I Am Number Four follows the trail of one of nine aliens who escapes from Lorien, his home planet. Number Four takes up residence as a regular high-school student named John Smith in Ohio, where he meets and falls in love with cheerleader Sarah Hart ( Glee’s Dianna Agron). Besides the lack of singing and otherworldly creatures, it’s just like an episode of Glee. Number Four is on the run from aliens from the Planet Mogadore who have already killed Numbers One, Two, and Three. Though being on the lam might not be the best way to catch the blond cheerleader, it proves to be a good way to capture audiences: I Am Number Four is estimated to lead the holiday weekend box office.
Courtesy of DreamWorks
In the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning 2007 movie based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, Josh Brolin plays one of the most doomed fugitives of all time: an unlucky chap who stumbled into a gang war and made off with a case of $2 million in Mexican drug money. Javier Barden won Best Support Actor for his role as Brolin’s pursuer: a cold-blooded assassin named Anton Chigurh with evil in his eyes and a disconcerting bob haircut. Chigurh infamously gives many of his victims a 50-50 chance of living with a cruel coin toss, but he eventually guns down Brolin’s character in a drug motel in El Paso, Texas.
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Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) wakes up to find himself floating in the Mediterranean with two bullet wounds and a serious case of amnesia in the first film of this series in 2002. As Bourne begins to piece together his life in Doug Liman’s spy film, he discovers he was once a highly specialized CIA operative that the agency tried to do away with—and their assassins are hot on his trail. The Bourne Identity was a box-office success and drew measured praise from critics. Bourne’s harrowing, martial-arts-filled flight from his former employer fueled two sequels that earned more critical acclaim and transformed the series into a box-office franchise and Damon into a full-fledged action hero.
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Leave it to Woody Allen to find humor in running from a police state. Allen wrote, directed, and starred in
Sleeper, a 1973 spoof of the standard Hollywood sci-fi fugitive drama. Miles Monroe, the owner of a heath food co-op in Greenwich Village, is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and wakes up 200 years later to find that the U.S. has dissolved into a police state. Since he’s the only person alive without an identification number, despite his explanations about what happened, he decides to hit the road and disguise himself as a robot. (How else would you blend in in the 22nd century?) Critics largely loved the funny take on fugitive life. “There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count,”
The New York Times reviewed of this slapstick on-the-run romp. “If anything, they allow you to catch your breath.”
Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis took a fake trailer from Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 2007
Grindhouse and metaphorically and literally ran with it. The trailer turned into the 2010 feature
Machete, which follows a former member of the Mexican Federales, Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo). His corrupt chief double-crosses him and a ruthless drug lord (Steven Seagal) kills Machete’s wife and daughter and leaves him for dead. Three years later,
Machete is an illegal immigrant and a renegade living in Texas. A local businessman hires him to assassinate the Lone Star State’s dirty Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), who wishes to close the Mexico-Texas border. Machete is double-crossed
again, shot, and learns that he was used as a pawn—labeling an illegal Mexican immigrant as the would-be assassin would drum up support for McLaughlin’s border-closing campaign. Machete soon finds himself on the run from the cops, a sultry U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent (Jessica Alba), and the businessman’s and McLaughlin’s men.
If its title is any indication,
The Fugitive is the ultimate “man on the run” film. Based off the 1960s television series of the same name, the 1993 movie stars Harrison Ford as Richard Kimble, a man wrongly accused of killing his wife. But it was
Tommy Lee Jones' turn as federal marshal Samuel Gerard that was honored with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The win set Jones up for the 1998 sequel,
U.S. Marshals, in which he returned as Gerard to track down Wesley Snipes’ innocent man. The not-as-well-received
U.S. Marshals turned the plot around, making Gerard the hero rather than the fugitive himself. But even if
U.S. Marshals made “us all wonder why” Jones won the Academy Award, according to the
San Francisco Chronicle, Jones still has the definitive speech from
The Fugitive to remind everyone of his dedication: “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in the area. Checkpoints go up in 15 miles. Your fugitive’s name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him.”
After CIA agent Evelyn Salt’s husband is killed, she goes on the run. Whose side she’s on and who she’s running from is unclear throughout the duration of the 2010 hit
Salt; but
Angelina Jolie’s building-jumping and spider-throwing as the title character make for some good entertainment.
Salt received generally positive reviews, with David Edelstein of
New York magazine calling it a “senseless blast,” and although there’s been no official confirmation of a sequel, the film’s ambiguous ending (and Hollywood’s appetite for
franchises) hints there might be one someday.
Logan 5, the hero of
Logan’s Run, refuses to accept the utopia of the 23rd-century utopia where life ends at 30. When his “Lifelock” expires and he’s pursued by his former friend, Francis 7, Logan 5 takes off. The 1976 film received largely negative reviews, with
The New York Times saying, “Just why and for what particular purpose Logan makes his run is anything but clear after you've sat through nearly two hours of this stuff.” But despite the critical panning,
Logan’s Run became a cult hit and a remake has been reportedly trying to escape the offices of Hollywood since 1994. The latest update:
Ryan Gosling will allegedly be starring and
Drive’s Nicolas Winding Refn will direct. Since Gosling just turned 30 in November, the whole premise should be of particular concern to him.
James Cameron’s 1984 film
The Terminator is set in a dystopia where machines have all but extinguished the human race. A cyborg assassin called the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back through time to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), before she gives birth to her son, John, who will grow up to be the leader of the human resistance. Though he fails to end Sarah’s life, the Terminator shoots up an entire police station full of cops in an effort to achieve his mission. In the 1991 sequel,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the resistance has reprogrammed the Terminator to go back through time and protect a teenage John Connor. However, the machines have also sent back an upgraded, liquid metal T-1000 Terminator assassin to kill young John. Since the original Terminator is still wanted by the police for the first film’s shootout, John, the Terminator, and Sarah must dodge the cops and the feisty and remarkably fast T-1000, who can transform his body into a vast array of metal objects, most notably (and dangerously) knives.
Steven Spielberg’s
Minority Report set the standard for the modern take on the sci-fi genre and spawned dozens of imitators. Tom Cruise starred in the 2002 trend-setter as John Anderton, a police offer who arrests people for “pre-crimes”—crimes they would commit in the future. When Anderton finds cracks in the system, he defects and goes on the run—a flight that requires him to have his eyes replaced so he can escape government retinal scans. Critics praised
Minority Report for its visual inventiveness; it was the first movie ever to have an entirely digital production design. Some said it marked a return to form for Spielberg, with
Time calling it his most exciting movie since
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In this 2005 film, Michael Bay tried to tackle the whole “sci-fi escape from the futuristic society” trope with his added token blockbuster features, i.e. massive explosions and high-speed chases. Bay cast Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in
The Island as clones living in a mythical dystopia of an island. Critics skewered the film and its script, which was chock-full of cliché fugitive vocabulary. “The dialogue is mostly breathless imperatives. ‘Run!’ ‘Watch out!’ ‘Go!’”
The New York Times noted. Seemingly,
The Island was Bay’s attempt to show off his CGI skills and his two beautiful stars, who “escape from the sealed world, and are chased by train, plane, automobile, helicopter and hover-cycle in a series of special-effects sequences that develop a breathless urgency,”
Roger Ebert reviewed.
This 1971 Blaxploitation film—written, produced, scored, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles—centers on a young African-American orphan who is raised in a Los Angeles brothel in the 1940s. He soon earns the name “Sweet Sweetback” for being incredibly well endowed. After a black man is murdered nearby, the police arrest Sweetback in order to appease the rowdy members of the community, but intend on releasing him a few days later due to lack of evidence. On the way to the precinct, however, the cops pick up a Black Panther and handcuff him to Sweetback. When the rebel starts insulting the officers, they undo his handcuffs and beat him. Sweetback then uses his handcuffs to beat the police unconscious and flees as quickly as he can. On his journey, Sweetback travels from South Central L.A. to the U.S.-Mexico border, dodging the cops and Hell’s Angels with only his wit and sexual prowess to guide him.
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In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 suspense thriller, Madison Avenue advertising exec Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan. Two thugs kidnap him and take him to what he believes to be the home of United Nations representative Lester Townsend. In actuality, it’s the residence of Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), who orders his Boy Friday, Leonard (Martin Landau), to dispose of Thornhill. However, he evades his staged fatal car accident and heads to the U.N.’s General Assembly building to confront Townsend—but one of Vandamm’s henchmen throws a knife, landing in the real Townsend’s back. His body falls into Thornhill’s arms and, when witnesses see him remove the knife, they assume he’s the killer. Now, the police and Vandamm’s men are after Thornhill, who, with only the help of a mysterious blonde (Eva Marie Saint), must dodge police, henchmen, and an infamous crop-dusting plane as he escapes Manhattan and finds himself on the faces of Mount Rushmore.
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