Tapped Out

The Firm, 1993

I kept waiting for it. The moment when Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) does a complete about-face and reveals himself for the evil bastard he is. In The Firm, a thriller about a legal team that exists to create shell companies and offshore accounts for the mafia, you expect everyone to be a good old boy, until the moment they’re not. It’s full of beloved character actors from Hal Holbrook to Margo Martindale to Holly Hunter in an egregious wig, and they’re all given one directive: be as sweet and gentle as possible so that the sinister corruption behind the “we’re all family here” firm is easier to see. We need to feel as scared as Tom Cruise’s up-by-the-bootstraps, just-out-of-grad-school lawyer is to learn that the big money associates he’s in bed with are all Bad Guys.