Review of Jerry Maguire (1996) by Paige A — 22 Feb 2010

I love this film. Purely. Tom Cruise has made many good films, but few manage to truly shine as GREAT films. This is one of them.

To put it bluntly, a stonecold, hip sports agent named Jerry Maguire [Cruise], has a kind of epiphany where he realizes he's basically the scum of the Earth. He's lost touch with morality and humanity, and, in a deperate attempt to regain touch, pours out his heart and soul into a mission statement about the evils of greed in a business such that he is in. The rest of the film is the result of what happens once he's found himself.

Jerry Maguire covers many topics well, including: love, relationships, morality, greed, friendship, humanity, dependency, etc. All executed beautifully and faultlessly woven in together. Also, the sports relationship and romantic relationship paralleled perfectly, cut with interludes from a passed character shaping each portion of the film into something with a fortune cookie-like theme. Very cute idea, if you ask me. Kind of like an episode of Just Shoot Me, with the magazine covers.

Tom Cruise, Renee Zellwegger, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bonnie Hunt, and even little Jonathan Lipnicki fill their roles so well that, even if you couldn't relate to each of them, you can feel them. They shape the story into something so excellent and touching, even the pseudo-cheesy romantic lines can't throw you off. One of Cruise's best performances, and an awesome creation from Crowe.

Moving storyline. Very cool soundtrack including the melancholy track, Secret Garden by Bruce Springsteen. The score tells the story almost as well as the film does. Reccommended.