A boring and pretentious three hours

Rating: 1/10 (3 April 2000)

I went to this film, not knowing what to expect. I'm not a big Tom Cruise fan, but I'm a sports fan, and hey, this is a sports movie. Big mistake. I suffered through three hours of seeing Renée Zellweger (very talented actress, this was the first time I saw her) say that Tom Cruise's character was such a great guy for actually saying he should spend time on his sports athlete clients. At the expense of other clients. Zellweger does a good job, though there's no reason why her character or anyone else would quit her job because some guy wrote a few words about caring. Many of us receive stuff like this in regular inspirational e-mails from our bosses or coworkers, and see what Dorothy (Zellweger) failed to see -- it's talk, and it's cheap. Cruise spends three hours trying to show that he cares about something or everything. There's little reason to see this as anything but acting through the lines in the script, as Cruise never once manages to show that he does care. The great thing about this movie is how it resusciated Cuba Gooding Jr.'s career from unwarranted obscurity. Aside from that, there's little to like here. Why should any of us care that an agent got his prima donna star athlete a great contract? Most of us work for far less in a decade than Maguire's one commission in an afternoon.