The Firm (1993)
Directed by Sydney Pollack

Film Review

John Grisham's thriller novels may not be great works of literature, but they have the one virtue of being very effective page turners, in most cases taking a criminally mundane plot and rendering it irresistibly compelling.  Alas, the same cannot be said of the numerous film adapt of Grisham's books, which are generally so weighed down by the intricacies of the author's plots that they invariably end up as extravagantly turgid studies in how not to make a thriller film.  Sydney Pollack's The Firm is a prime example of this.  Despite some commendable performances from a very respectable cast and some lavish production values, the film ends up as a lumbering behemoth that struggles to hold the spectator's interest and seems to drag on for an eternity.  Whereas Grisham's novel zips effortlessly along, lightened by its author's mischievous humour, the film crawls at the pace of an arthritic snail in a funeral cortege.  Except for those happy souls who have a well-developed photocopying fetish, it is hard to see how the film could ever rate as thrilling entertainment.

Tom Cruise does his damnedest to make his character interesting, but the screenwriters give him next to no help and so poor Mitch McDeere is as bland and unsympathetic on screen as he is on the printed page.  Do we give a monkey's if the the high-flying yuppie lawyer gets turned into mincemeat by the Mafia or the FBI?  Not really.  Gene Hackman gets the more interesting character, and by default steals most of our attention - you end up wishing he had a much bigger role to play in the story.  Most of the other protagonists are colourless or absurd caricatures that manage to look even more dull and two dimensional than John Grisham's original creations.  After an excruciatingly slow build up, the film just about manages to deliver some kind of payoff in the last twenty minutes (if you can call an interminable street chase a payoff), but by that stage you're either bored out of your mind or have given up and decided to do something more profitable with your life.  Stick with the novel - it's far better value for money, unless you're a die-hard Tom Cruise fan or just can't get enough hard core Xerox action.

Film Synopsis

Just as he is about to graduate from Harvard Law School with honours, Mitch McDeere finds himself inundated with lucrative job offers.  The offer he receives from Bendini, Lambert and Locke, a small law firm in Memphis, is too good to refuse, including not only a skyrocket salary but also an executive house and expensive car.  Not long after Mitch starts work, two of the company's associates are killed, ostensibly in an accident.  When Mitch discovers this is not the first time the company's employees have died in mysterious circumstances he begins to get suspicious.  His fears are confirmed when FBI agents contact him and tell him that his company is owned by the Mafia, who use it to launder their ill-gotten gains.  Mitch has a choice: he can either cooperate with the FBI and risk his life and future career by providing evidence that will convict every partner in the film; or he can go on working for the firm, confident in the knowledge that one day the FBI will succeed without his help and arrest him along with all the others.  In either case, Mitch's life as a free man appears to be over...