"Bad Company" is a thriller of extravagant complexity, a thinking man's Grisham film. It is about smart, ruthless people who once worked for the CIA and now engage in free-lance espionage. They are greedy, relentless and willing to kill, and of course they are expensively dressed and housed; these are the kinds of people who touch themselves as if afraid of leaving prints.
As the movie opens, a man named Nelson Crowe (Laurence Fishburne) is being interviewed for a job in the Grimes Organization, which specializes in industrial dirty tricks. He is hired by Margaret Wells (Ellen Barkin), the second in command, who takes him in to her boss, Vic Grimes (Frank Langella). All of these people hold themselves with studied casualness, and talk in elegant, mannered understatement: There is the implication in many crime movies that the villains have been to finishing schools the rest of us couldn't afford.