The film compresses a large amount of useful information from the original work into two and a half hours in the film. As a result, some useful details are also compressed out, resulting in the film without any real suspense.
Director Sidney Pollack tried to add some modern workplace-related elements to the film. The film is nowhere near as bad as the movie "Havana", Sidney Pollack did a good job, and so did Tom Cruise. For some audiences, the film is a thriller, but as a thriller, it is far from exciting.
The film may be more like a modern moral story than a thriller. The three screenwriters John Grisham, Robert Downey and David Rabe are still not perfect in narrative. Some plots of the film and the novel are quite different, but these changes have their undeniable significance and completeness. What is more successful than the suspense element is that the story has moral resonance.
