Three Fugitives

Three Fugitives (1989) is a US comedy you can watch online on iFILM — French director Francis Veber remade his own hit Les Fugitifs, this time built around the spectacularly wrong-for-each-other pairing of Nick Nolte and Martin Short.

Lucas has done fourteen armed bank robberies and just served five years. He walks out of prison planning to stay clean. Within the hour he is taken hostage by Perry, a desperate single father who picks the same bank to hold up so he can afford treatment for his mute daughter Meg. Detective Dugan immediately pins the whole job on Lucas, which means Lucas, Perry, and Meg are all on the run together — a situation nobody wants and nobody seems able to escape.

Nolte is effortlessly menacing; Short is effortlessly chaotic. The gap between those two registers is where all the comedy lives, and Veber knows exactly how to exploit it without ever letting the daughter's storyline turn cloying. James Earl Jones rounds out the chase as the relentless detective on their trail. Stream Three Fugitives (1989) on iFILM.