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.
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.