Empire 500 (2008): #420
Empire 301 (2014): Left Out
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%
Director: Cameron Crowe
Screenwriter: Cameron Crowe
Before watching this film, I had only seen one Cameron Crowe film, the brilliant Almost Famous which remains one of my favourites. So my expectations as I pressed play were perhaps unfairly high. There are one or two fantastic moments in this film, and the cast are outstanding across the board, but ultimately it doesn't feel tight enough and at least for me, something doesn't quite hit the mark.
It is still a very good film, expertly acted by everyone, especially the supporting roles of Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger) who provides the film with some much needed emotional depth and Rod Tidwell, (for which Cuba Gooding Jr. won an Academy Award) as the football player who sticks with Jerry Maguire when seemingly everything is lost for him, and the emotional payoff at the end of the film for all three of them is genuinely stirring. As we follow Jerry Maguire, who gets sacked from his high-paying job as a sports agent for the sin of writing a mission statement about the lack of honesty or respect in his business, losing everything besides his one client and one assistant, we become personally attached to him, due in no small part to the effort of Tom Cruise, who stays on just the right side of smarmy and know-it-all to be sympathetic. The film also avoids an easy cliché, shown especially in the romance between Jerry and Dorothy.
However, the film feels at times a bit too flabby and contain some meaningless characters. Chief among them is the babysitter of Dorothy's son who despite being completely meaningless to the advancement of the plot is given a lot of screen time, and doesn't add anything at all to the overall experience of the film. The long film also occasionally meanders a bit too much at certain points. A very good film, but in my opinion not quite as good as Almost Famous, which is a great movie.
4/5 Stars
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