slightlymad22 Continuing my plan to watch every Tom Cruise movie in order, I come to The Firm (1993)Plot In A Paragraph: Young lawyerMitch McDeere (Cruise) joins a prestigious law firm only to discover that it has a sinister dark side.After two underperforming movies in a row, Cruise is back with two back to back big hits. Personally I think this is a little too long. This is a really good movie with some great performances, but it should have been a great movie. I don't have a problem with long movies (I actually prefer them) but this movie didn't warrant such a long run time. With a bit of trimming and a tighter screenplay this would be a classic.This features a great Crusie performance Gene Hackman is his usual brilliant self Hal Holbrook is as reliable as always, Ed Harris is very disturbing looking with his bald head, Wifred Burnley makes a surprisingly convincing bad guy. Jeanne Tripplehorn is fine, Gary Busey has a role as a very small role as a private eye, and Paul Sorvino has an even smaller one. Holly Hunter was Oscar nominated for her small role. The Firm grossed $158million at the domestic box office, to end the year the 4th highest grossing movie of 1993.

Sean Lamberger Tom Cruise as a hotshot lawyer, fresh out of school, who takes a tantalizing job offer in Memphis and discovers it's more than he bargained for. Soon he's on the run from both the law and his former bosses, trying to serve justice without sacrificing his young career along the way. It's serviceable, but has some issues. Most of the plot revolves around various cast members making poor decisions under pressure, which is odd considering they share a profession that demands cool heads. The big-spending highs never seem all that high, perhaps a symptom of the movie's age (the cushy home Cruise is provided by his new employers is furnished to look like your Grandma's crib), and the chief threats can be hard to take seriously because they always seem so bumbling and aloof. The firm's muscle, led by a rotund, elderly Wilford Brimley (with a quick appearance from Breaking Bad's Dean Norris), is a comedy of errors and the pursuing FBI squad, likewise, can't get out of its own way. It has twists and turns, standard for a Grisham adaptation, but they aren't always set up properly and don't make a ton of sense. Usually you'd expect some great oration from this kind of place setting, but the monologues are kept short and underwhelming in favor of a series of frantic chase scenes and tense near-misses. A touch on the bland side, it's not as bad as my complaints might let on but also not as good as some of the author's better-known works.

gavin6942 A young lawyer (Tom Cruise) joins a prestigious law firm only to discover that it has a sinister dark side.Roger Ebert gave "The Firm" three stars out of four, remarking: "The movie is virtually an anthology of good small character performances. The large gallery of characters makes The Firm into a convincing canvas but with a screenplay that developed the story more clearly, this might have been a superior movie, instead of just a good one with some fine performances." I think Ebert is spot on here. The plot is pretty good, but never seems as strong as the characters. Every actor gives the full amount of their potential.For me, it was a thrill to see Tobin Bell. Cruise is great, and was apparently very athletic at this point in his career -- Paul Calderon recalls that Cruise was mountain climbing on weekends. Gene Hackman is incredible, Ed Harris is pretty good... heck, even Gary Busey performs better than usual. But Bell is great to see. I do not think he really became known before "Saw", and even then only by certain people. Here, he has an excellent supporting role as a hit man.

seymourblack-1 Anyone who has experienced poverty or hardship in their early life never forgets the experience and always retains a certain element of insecurity about wealth, regardless of how much financial success they later achieve. In "The Firm", it's this phenomenon that essentially drives a brilliant young law student to ignore numerous offers of career-enhancing opportunities from a number of prestigious big city law firms to, instead, join a small Memphis partnership who offer him a fantastic remuneration package. Unfortunately, what follows, perfectly illustrates the wisdom of the old adage that "if something seems too good to be true, it probably is".Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is the Harvard Law School graduate from a poor background whose exceptional academic achievements lead to him being head-hunted by "Berdini, Lambert & Locke". The firm offer him a huge salary, a low-interest mortgage, a Mercedes and the repayment of his student loans and in return, Mitch readily agrees to join them. After relocating to Memphis with his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn), he quickly settles into the practice and regularly works long hours. Initially, he's comfortable with the firm's family ethos and doesn't share Abby's unease about some of the advice she receives such as "the firm encourages children" etc. A little later, however, when he realises that a high percentage of the firm's work is related to the activities of the Mob and a couple of the firm's lawyers suddenly die in mysterious circumstances, he gets the strong feeling that something sinister is going on.Mitch's suspicions are confirmed when he gets approached by the director of the FBI and Agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) who inform him about the firm's criminal and money-laundering activities. They want Mitch to supply them with information and documents to be used as evidence to bring his employers to justice and add that if he doesn't co-operate, things will be made very difficult for his brother who's in jail facing a manslaughter charge. They also emphasise that Mitch effectively doesn't have any choice in the matter because no partner has ever left the firm alive and if he simply decides to stay with the firm, he could face 20 years in prison when they go down, as they inevitably will.Mitch knows it would be impossible to pass on the documents that the FBI want without breaching the confidence of his legitimate clients and taking that action would inevitably lead to the loss of his licence to practice law. He therefore realises that in order to meet their demands without losing his career, making his brother's parlous situation worse or winding up dead at the hands of his ruthless employers (or the Mob), he needs to devise an imaginative plan to get out of the trap he's in. When he then discovers that the firm have routinely been over-billing clients for some considerable time, he starts to see an opportunity to formulate just such a plan but, of course, its success is by no means guaranteed.Based on John Grisham's bestselling novel, this glossy thriller was understandably a huge box-office success. It's intriguing, tense and highly entertaining and features a whole collection of great performances from its star-studded cast. Surprisingly though, it's Gary Busey, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris and Holly Hunter that really bring the screen to life in their relatively small parts while Tom Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn also do well in their starring roles.