The Firm is surprisingly subtle. It is a movie about lawyers in which we never see a courtroom. It is a movie with a clear sense of morality – The titular firm is bad and Tom Cruise is good – but with a great deal of sympathy for the characters who personify the firm and what it does.

The thing I found myself thinking over and over again while watching The Firm was that the movie could never have been greenlit in today’s cinema. It is not an overly serious, preachy drama. There are no monologues at all that I can recall, and certainly none where characters yell and pound their chest about their worldviews. The plot takes odd turns, indulging in characters like Holly Hunter’s Tammy, her husband, an Elvis impersonator, and her lover, an ex-con-turned-private-investigator played by Gary Busey. An important character central to the resolution of the plot is introduced in the latter part of the third act.

The Firm is also not a typical summer action blockbuster. There are a few gunshots in the movie but outside of the now-requisite Tom Cruise running scene all of the action occurs off screen and nobody saves the world at all. In fact, at the end of the movie Tom Cruise goes out of his way to NOT save the world. It would not have been successful in today’s cinema, and if it had been approved and marketed and sold to American audiences it definitely would not have starred Tom Cruise.

The score is surprising, too, steering clear of sweeping classical strings and almost completely devoid of a soundtrack, almost entirely filled with playful, bluesy piano. It serves as an indicator, a nod from Sydney Pollack the Director saying “yes, this is kind of a silly premise for a movie. It’s ok. Let’s just have some fun.” And it is fun. The movie works.

I’m not sure if we’re at an irreversible point in American cinema where movies like The Firm can’t emerge in Hollywood and people must turn to television for modest adult-oriented dramas where people solve their problems mostly through talking, but it does seem like the last 10 years of movies have been almost completely devoid of films like this. I know that isn’t entirely true, and a lot of medium to low budget dramas are being produced and made and exist slightly under the radar only to be discovered on Netflix or touted by cinephiles until their friends eventually cave and pretend they like them, but the fact that these movies aren’t present in our common pop culture conversations is kind of the point.

And I can’t say that I even care, either, because I’m as guilty as the next guy of getting excited about whatever Thanos is going to do with that stupid glove and watching big strong men punch each other into buildings in 150 minute chunks. I probably wouldn’t even go see The Firm if it came out in theaters today. But I can tell you that I was a whole lot more satisfied after watching it than I was at the end of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, which I watched on the same flight.

Ok, I didn’t mean for this to be so cynical. The Firm is okay. It’s not going to change your life, but it’s well made. The performances are good. I know you don’t really care and are just waiting for me to get to Mission: Impossible. Me too.

Next: Interview with the Vampire