An average movie

Back in those days, Tom Cruise was the biggest and unchallenged movie star and all his movies were making some big bucks. This time, he showed up in one of those John Grisham’s book adaptations, it was easily the most successful one and I have to admit it was actually fairly entertaining. It's too bad that, as usual with Grisham's work, the story was still too far-fetched for my taste though and the whole thing was probably too long as well. Still, I really have a weak spot for Sydney Pollack’s work, his directing was as usual pretty solid and it was neat to see how much he managed to elevate this material. Concerning Tom Cruise, he was as usual quite charismatic but I don't think he gave here one of his best performances. The fact that his character was rather bland and so naive probably didn’t help and it was rather annoying that he turned out to be after all so clever that he managed to outsmart everybody including his 'firm', the FBI and the mob. In fact, I was more impressed by Gene Hackman who managed to deliver a much more interesting and flawed character with so much less screen time than Cruise. To round up the cast, you had also Jeanne Tripplehorn, Hal Holbrook, Terry Kinney, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Tobin Bell and they all did a pretty good job even if it was rather pushing it to give an Academy award nomination for Holly Hunter for her performance which was not even 6 minutes long. Anyway, to conclude, even though I don’t think it is anything really amazing, it is still a decent thriller and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.