The Fugitive is just awesome. Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford in their element, Ford as a man on the run for a crime he didn’t commit and Jones the marshal tasked with bringing him in. Pretty straightforward stuff but executed terrifically, especially for its 1993 context.
Of course, the reason it is worth watching on St. Patrick’s Day is same reason it’s appropriate to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on Von Steuben Day: both movies feature a parade celebrating those respective events. John Hughes thought it appropriate to have a parade with German dancers, and The Fugitive director Andrew Davis evidently also thought it would be a nice aesthetic tough to have Irish lady dancers. So the movie features a scene with the Harrison Ford character finding cover in the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day parade. You can watch the rest of the movie and forget about it, but then you’ll see the St. Patrick’s Day sequence and think oh hey, that’s like the thing that’s happening right now in my life and feel connected in a way that would not have happened had you watched The Fugitive on any other day of the year. So there’s that.
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