When Tom Cruise Became the New Elvis (And Not in a Good Way)

I don’t love Tom Cruise.  And it’s not the Scientology.  Or maybe it is and I just don’t know it.  He’s weird.  Let’s just put it down to that.

But there’s one movie of his that I’ve seen probably a hundred times or more; if not start-to-finish, then in bits and pieces as I’ve happened upon it while channel surfing and been powerless to pass it by:  “The Firm”.

Released in 1993, “The Firm” stars Cruise as Mitch McDeere, a Harvard Law graduate recruited by a small firm in Memphis.  What Mitch soon discovers is that the firm secretly represents the Morolto crime family . . . a.k.a. the mafia, and there’s no way out.  At least not alive.

Mitch ends up stuck between the firm, the mob, and the feds, who want him to snitch, which would get him disbarred, and put him on the mafia’s not-so-loved list.

His solution?  Instead of revealing client secrets, he gives the government evidence of massive overbilling at the firm . . . enough to indict every partner on federal charges; destroying the firm and keeping him from getting whacked.  Or so he hopes.

“The Firm” is a tense, well-written thriller with great characters . . . including Wilford Brimley ignoring his diabeetus and playing against type as the evil, badass head of security for the firm.  (“What do you think I am here, a fuckin’ night watchman?!”)

But here’s where The King comes in . . .

Mitch doesn’t come up with the overbilling idea on his own.  He gets it from a client.  A black client.

But at the end of the movie, when an FBI agent asks him how he came up with it, he says, “It was on the bar exam.  They made me study like hell for it.”

In other words, he steals the intellectual property of a black man and passes it off as his own.  Not only that, but he does it in Memphis, Tennessee, the home of the man who did it best: Elvis Aaron Presley.

And he never even offered so much as a “Thank you very much.”