The Fugitive (1993) - 9 questions

Question: Towards the end, before the confrontation with Kimble and Nicholls, the guy who was tracing Kimble's phone records tells the Marshalls that Kimble telephoned Sykes on the night of his wife's murder. But obviously it wasn't Kimble calling Sykes, it was Sykes using Kimble's phone. But why would Sykes be calling himself?

Answer: He didn't. A key plot point is that Nichols borrowed Kimble's car on the night of the murder. The call to Sykes, which is expressly stated by the marshals as being on Kimble's car phone, was from Nichols, presumably arranging to meet so that he could give Sykes Kimble's keys to get into his house to lie in wait for him.

Question: What does the woman ask her son in Polish? with my limited Russian and Serbo/Croatian skills, I believe she started with, "What do you think..."

Answer: She says, roughly: What do you think? Does he look like the right sort?

Question: How much time does this movie cover? I ask because when Sykes is being interrogated, he says he was questioned about Helen Kimble's murder a year ago. And Nichols says that Lentz died last summer, but Richard saw him at the fundraiser the same night his wife died. Is this a mistake or is there something I'm missing?

Answer: Murder investigations are not, as a rule, speedy processes; it's quite plausible that a year could have passed between Helen Kimble's murder and her husband's conviction for the crime. The police have to gather evidence, question witnesses, put their case together and so forth. The main body of the film, from Kimble's escape onwards, probably only covers at most a few weeks, but Helen Kimble would undoubtedly have died some considerable time prior to that. The time periods stated in the film are quite reasonable.

Question: Originally, the plan was to kill Richard himself rather than his wife in order to keep him quiet about Provasic causing liver damage. But wouldn't Devlin MacGregor eventually have had to deal with the side effects anyway, especially when the wrongful death lawsuits began pouring in? I know some suspension of disbelief is required, but this still seems like a stretch.

Answer: Not really. If anybody raises a wrongful death lawsuit against them, Devlin MacGregor's high-priced lawyers can just point to their battery of "successful" test results to show that no side-effects occurred during their comprehensive testing. If they then dig deeper into the case, then, lo and behold, it's revealed that the tests were all faked, with the fake results signed off on by Dr Alexander Lentz, who was, rather conveniently, tragically killed in a car accident. It would be easy to cast Lentz as the villain, faking the test results for his own reasons, which gets Devlin MacGregor off the hook. In all probability, the original idea was to frame Kimble for the fraudulent testing - with Kimble killed in a "burglary gone wrong", he could easily be used as a scapegoat. When things went awry and Kimble's wife was killed instead, this gave them the perfect angle to completely discredit Kimble, taking him out of the equation, and they switched to a replacement plan of using Lentz as their scapegoat, forging his signature on the test results and arranging the car accident that killed him.

Question: Again, was the Polish woman's son really a drug dealer? A little piece of me thinks that it could have been a ruse by the Chicago PD to get him in and let Kimble think he was safe for the moment. Or, did he tell the cops that Kimble was living in his mother's basement as leverage to get out of being arrested for drug dealing??

Answer: Why on earth would the Chicago PD leave Kimble to think he was safe if they knew his location? He's a convicted killer - they find him, they grab him, they throw him in prison, end of story. No requirement to lull him into a false sense of security. They busted the Polish woman's son for drug dealing - he turned Kimble in to try to buy some leniency.

Question: At one point, Kimble steals an ambulance. We then cut to the U.S Marshals, who say "An ambulance has been spotted...". They then run off to intercept it. But surely there's more than one ambulance in that area, and surely more than one person has seen an ambulance in that time?

Answer: True, but if they cannot contact this one or it is seen driving eratically or out of it's designated area, that is sufficent to cause suspicion.

Question: When Kimball's dying wife calls 999, why does she say "Richard is trying to kill me?"

Answer: She said "Richard, he's trying to kill me" refering to the one armed man. It sounded like "Richard is trying to kill me".

Question: Why don't the US Marshalls also go after the other escaped prisoner that was on the bus? He was the one who helped Harrison Ford escape and told him not to follow him. Why wasn't it as important that he be caught too?

Answer: He's the one whose house they storm (he gets shot).

Question: At the very end, what was in the plastic bag that Tommy Lee Jones' character gives to Harrison Ford?

Answer: It's a cold compress. You squeeze it, and the inner bag breaks mixing chemicals and it gets very cold. It helps to minimize swelling. He gave it to Kimball for all the bruises he had.