Cameron Steele (Christopher George, Mortuary) is a famous escape artist who can get outta anything … but couldn’t get into a weekly time slot, unfortunately. From director John Llewellyn Moxey (Horror Hotel), the made-for-TV movie Escape may be a “failed” pilot for what should have been a series, but it is a damn fine hour and a half of, um, escapism.

Now a private dick who lives above a bar catering to magicians, Steele takes a $25K gig to find Dr. Henry Walding (William Windom, She’s Having a Baby), a scientist who has gone missing — and whose lab has been torched — after cracking the code toward creation of a game-changing virus. As feared by Walding’s estranged daughter in the fashion industry (Marlyn Mason, Fifteen and Pregnant), the doc indeed has been kidnapped. As feared by no one, however, the culprit is Walding’s own brother, Charles (John Vernon, Killer Klowns from Outer Space), which is totally weird since he’s supposed to be deceased!

Charles is holding Henry captive, wishing to use his brother’s breakthrough for nefarious purposes. But the “why” is less important than the “where”: the Happyland amusement park! Yes, in order to spring Henry from captivity, Steele must navigate a funhouse laden with tricks and traps, which is where the telefilm lives up to the wonder promised by its way-out opening credits, scored by Mission: Impossible maestro Lalo Schifrin. In fact, Escape plays like an episode of M:I unfolding within a maze of mirrors — never a bad thing.

Serving up bonus kicks are members of the kitchen-sink supporting cast, including former Bowery Boy Huntz Hall, prime-past Oscar winner Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful) and, as Steele’s associate, comedian Avery Schreiber (Loose Shoes) in a rare straight role — well, straight if we’re using his Doritos ads as the benchmark. —Rod Lott

If you’ve ever wanted to see someone kick the ever-lovin’ crap out of Wilford Brimley while he’s down on the ground — and let’s face it, we all have at one point in our lives — then why don’t you just go right ahead and move The Firm to the top of your queue.

We tend to forget there was a time when legal thrillers were actually Academy Award-chasing, taut courtroom explorations of a usually broken legal system, stylistically told in such a legalese-driven, attention-demanding way where viewers, no matter how bored, collectively waited on the edge of their bench for a jury-read verdict in the last 15 minutes so nerve-wracking you’d think it was their mama up for murder one; TL;DR, remember movies like The Verdict, … And Justice for All or From the Hip?

In the early 1990s, however, much like a young Michael Bay with LegalZoom gift certificate, that all changed when along came best-selling wunderkind John Grisham, an author whose works of idealist first-year Southern lawyers taking on a judicial system for dummies in very stupid (but thoroughly entertaining) works like The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill and Christmas with the Kranks were adapted for films in a rapid succession not seen since the great Stephen King boom of the mid-’80s, dumbing down a subgenre that has never since recovered.

The best of these cinematic legal briefs, in my opinion, was the 1993 adaptation of The Firm — not to be confused with the best-selling series of booty-enhancement exercise videos, unfortunately — starring Tom Cruise as a super-driven hotshot fresh out of law school (and harnessing unexplained Olympic-level gymnastic abilities for reasons never offered) as he takes a job with a shadowy law firm made up of some of the most aged Caucasian actors Hollywood had to offer, including Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook and the aforementioned Brimley as the oatmeal-lovin’ head of security. I’m pretty sure I saw Statler and Waldorf in one of the sweeping long shots, but that could just be the Mandela Effect.

When a well-meaning business trip to the Cayman Islands leads to Cruise seeing some clearly marked and easy-to-read files he apparently wasn’t meant to see, things get pretty complicated as he tries to figure out a way to turn everything over to the feds without being disbarred or have the mafia (obligatory Paul Sorvino cameo) cap him. When a short-lived, mostly cognizant Gary Busey enters the picture, things get mildly confusing, what with all the switcheroos and double-dealing and subplots about overbilling, many scenes of which are still parodied today, as of late by an extremely irritating M&M’s ad that plays before most movie trailers.

With a very strong cast, including the mannish-jawed, Southern-style bold ’n’ saucy combo of Holly Hunter and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ed Harris as an impatient spook and an out-of-place David Strathairn as a supposedly hardened convict, perhaps the most memorable character is Saw’s Tobin Bell as the law firm’s hitman, a role made even creepier by him sporting an albino mullet, apparently from the Rutger Hauer for Men signature hairpiece collection.

Director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie) does a great job of crafting a tense, paranoid thriller based around the dumbest of conceits, but with a smirking Cruise in control and a cast of fermented gravitas, it surprisingly still holds up almost 25 years later, with enough turns and twists to keep anyone from yelling “Objection!” to their television, no one in particular listening. Apparently they made a sequel to this, in the form of a TV series, but I’ll be damned if I ever heard about it. Case closed. — Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.