I have been a little bit guilty lately of waxing poetic on the big-budget middle-brow thrillers of yesteryear. It does seem like the 80s and 90s were packed with a kind of not particularly smart, not particularly dumb, but well-crafted, thoughtful thriller or drama—a genre that feels at this point extinct, having been supplanted by streaming miniseries and Marvel movies. I wish we had more of this kind of film and am perhaps predisposed to review their ilk more kindly for want of modern replacement. They, like any other genre, are easily bruised. The Firm as a plot is not just Grisham but feels like a platonic ideal of Grisham. It is the, I say this without condescension or critique, simplest and most stereotypical Grisham legal thriller you can imagine. And because that is the case, I find it hard to talk about the gestalt of the movie. Instead, my mind immediately goes to the granular things that worked and didn't work.

I'll start with the things that didn't work so I can end on a more positive series of notes. This is an overlong, overwrought, melodramatic film with some absolutely ridiculous flourishes (I'm thinking of the cartwheel scene and a completely unnecessary 10-minute chase scene involving Wilford Brimley) that is managed rather than buoyed by Tom Cruise, who is given charge of a script that is scattershot and thin. It just plain drags, which is hard to say given how rote and predictable everything is in hindsight. Even the score feels bizarre. The final act of the film has a jaunty jazz piano undercurrent, which makes the whole thing feel like an Ocean's precursor rather than a taut, dramatic climax. That being said, there are some terrific, terrific moments, and all of them are outshadowed by Gene Hackman playing a still thin script absolutely perfectly. His blend of smarm, menace, and self-awareness quite literally carried the film, both in its earlier acts where a more obvious portrayal would give the whole game away, and in the final act where it would drain the entire "heist" of any nuance or interest.

The firm is largely populated with one-note portrayals of one-note characters, and Hackman devours them all. It's a film worth sitting through for his performance alone (and, in second place, Tripplehorn's).

★★★