Cinema fans are currently excited about “Top Gun 2: Maverick” and are eagerly awaiting “Mission: Impossible 7”. Yet Tom Cruise made his greatest film back in the 1990s. And it’s currently included in the Amazon Prime Video subscription.
You may think what you like about Tom Cruise and his connection to Scientology. But it is incontrovertible that in a career that has now spanned 40 years, the man has played a decisive role in an almost unbelievable number of top films and modern classics: from his breakthrough with “Loose Business” to “Top Gun”, “Rain Man”, “A Question of Honour”, “Jerry Maguire” and “Magnolia” to “Edge Of Tomorrow” and, of course, the “Mission: Impossible” series.
Hardly any other actor has been as accurate in terms of public taste over such a long period of time as the man from Syracuse in the US state of New York. While I like all the films I just mentioned (and many more) with him and enjoy watching them again and again, there is one title in Cruise’s filmography that is particularly close to my heart and that I consider his best: “The Company” from 1993. Currently, the thriller drama is included in Amazon Prime Video’s subscription and can, of course, also be purchased on DVD and Blu-ray:
THIS IS WHAT “THE COMPANY” IS ABOUT ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO:
As one of the top students in his law school class at the elite Harvard University, Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) receives lucrative offers from some of the most powerful law firms in the US. He finally chooses the firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke in Memphis. Not only is the firm financially very generous to him, but the bosses (Hal Holbrook, Jerry Hardin) are also family-friendly and claim to be genuinely interested in the private well-being of their employees.
McDeere convinces his initially hesitant wife, the teacher Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn), to move to Memphis with him. The couple are provided with a huge house plus expensive cars and quickly settle in accordingly, while the young man rises to become the new star of the company under the guidance of his mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman). However, the joy of all this does not last long. For the FBI, in the person of Agent Torrance (Ed Harris), comes to McDeere and informs him that the firm is in direct contact with the Chicago mafia. In addition, several of their lawyers have already been murdered under mysterious circumstances in recent years …
“THE COMPANY” AS THE TRIGGER OF A BIG WELL
When the thriller was released worldwide in 1993, it immediately became a hit. Like me, the rest of the audience was apparently fascinated by the ruthless methods and clever tricks of the “shysters”. We were only too happy to fear for the fate of the main character and whether he would choose the morally right side. Thanks to this adaptation of his second novel, completed only two years earlier, the already enormously popular ex-lawyer John Grisham finally mutated into a literary titan. From then on, studios scrambled for the rights to his works and the box office success of “The Firm” unleashed a whole wave of film adaptations of his justice novels into the 2000s.
The most relevant of these to this day are “The File” with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, “The Jury” with Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock, and “The Rainmaker” with a still very young Matt Damon. Some of these works are very successful, but none of them comes close to “The Firm”. This may be partly due to the source material, as the original is one of the author’s best books to date. The most important element for the success of “The Company” for me, however, is the performance of the lead actor Cruise.
