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Alextris
Reviews
Murder in Mind (1997)
Don't bother.
The question in this movie is not "Whodunit", but rather "Whydidtheydunit". In the opening scene (in the dark and rain...how mysterious) the police descend on the ritzy abode of Jimmy Smits and Mary-Louise Parker to discover the former lying in the foyer with some shrub clippers protruding from his belly (the couples handyman is also dead, but who cares?). Parker is upstairs, covered in blood, clutching a knife and staring into space.
It seems pretty darn obvious that she did it, but she doesn't remember a thing, so the cops bring in a world-renowned psychiatric expert (Nigel Hawthorne) who luckily lives nearby to clear up the whole mess. He doesn't.
We then suffer through a ninety-minute quest to define the nature of memory and the mind which is both confusing (it is supposed to be) and boring (an unintended consequence).
It's hard to believe that Jimmy Smits left "NYPD Blue" to pursue these kind of career opportunities.
U.S. Marshals (1998)
The first one was better.
This is a sequel to the 1993 flick, The Fugitive, and, despite decent performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Wesley Snipes (Irene Jacob, a very talented French actress, who is also a babe of biblical proportions, appears much too infrequently), was far inferior to its predecessor. It was a suspense movie without the suspense (anyone who doesn't know how it's going to end before it starts should be watching Scooby Doo).
The trick in this type of movie is to generate suspense anyway, and I found U.S. Marshals sorely lacking. The dialog was sappy, the plot "twists" were entirely predictable and the climax was, well...not all that climatic. There were too many lulls in the action (the lack thereof saved the first film) and the story was WAY too derivative of its predecessor.
You'd be better off watching The Fugitive again.