Not really. Ancillary characters are in a story for a reason, to bring color and flash in short bursts. As exciting as Gerard and his staff of lawmen were in The Fugitive, there's something curiously ordinary about these folks as the subject of a feature. A team of federal cops catching crooks is the stuff of weekly TV shows, not motion-picture spectaculars.

The plot of U.S. Marshals is modified only slightly from its predecessor. Wesley Snipes plays a man incarcerated for a frame-up crime. During a "routine prison transfer"--is there any other kind in the movies?--a planeful of convicts goes down, and Snipes makes his escape. Jones is on the same plane, and he takes the con's flight personally. The marshals are called in, along with a special government operative (played by Robert Downey Jr., on loan from his own "routine prison transfer").

As in The Fugitive, there are close shaves and double-crosses and the occasional eye-popping stunt, but this time out, the load is unbalanced. Snipes' fugitive never develops into a recognizable person with real emotions. We never feel his panic. Instead, we're immersed in the hyperdrive rattle of Jones' dialogue, and the quick leaps of logic made by him and his fellow cops.

In fact, U.S. Marshals might've made a fine police procedural, if its plot twists weren't so obvious, and if it didn't carom off at impossible angles. Even the opening crash lacks the heat of realism--when the plane dives suddenly, no one hits the ceiling, and when the plane taxis down a makeshift highway landing strip, its wing strikes several telephone poles without sending the jet careening. Director Stuart Baird never convinces us that there's an original thinker or a vivid imagination behind the camera lens: A plane crash is a plane crash, and a chase is a chase.