There’s something slightly disconcerting about watching ‘Jerry Maguire’ again nearly 30 years later and discovering that my estimation of it hasn’t really changed.

This is ostensibly a redemption story, except I’m not entirely convinced Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) needs redeeming.

In that sense, it’s almost a pared-down version of ‘A Christmas Carol’, but with the structure turned inside out. Scrooge spends most of his story behaving appallingly before undergoing his crisis of conscience at the end. Jerry has his crisis of conscience right at the beginning.

Tom Cruise plays a hugely successful sports agent operating in a ferociously competitive business where money talks. Jerry suddenly wakes up to the fact that something about this world isn’t right. His company represents too many athletes, everybody is chasing increasingly enormous amounts of money, and the human beings at the centre of it all have become secondary to the deals.

So Jerry writes his famous mission statement: Fewer clients. Less money. More personal attention. In other words, people before profit.

This doesn’t go down particularly well. We are, after all, only a few years removed from the cultural world of Gordon Gekko and ‘greed is good’, and ‘Jerry Maguire’ is fascinated by a corporate culture in which success is measured almost entirely through money.

Jerry’s great rebellion is to suggest that perhaps there should be something more, but the company responds by getting rid of him.

There’s an interesting irony here because Cruise himself had become one of the defining movie stars of the 1980s and early 1990s: ambitious, handsome, successful and extraordinarily driven. Jerry initially appears to be another of those Cruise characters who understands exactly how the system works. Except this time he decides to stand against it.

In that sense, perhaps Jerry is a kind of Benjamin Braddock for the 1990s. He understands perfectly well what society expects him to do. Nobody needs to explain the rules because he’s already mastered them. His problem is that he suddenly isn’t sure he wants the life those rules have created for him.

But this is where I find ‘Jerry Maguire’ slightly peculiar as a character study. For, Jerry isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. He isn’t Gordon Gekko either. He’s not a particularly bad person at the beginning of the film and I’m not convinced he’s necessarily a substantially better person by the end. Certainly, his priorities change, but that’s different from the kind of moral transformation we normally associate with a redemption narrative.

Jerry doesn’t spend the film learning how badly he has treated everybody around him. If anything, people treat him badly. Once he has his crisis of conscience, the film becomes largely about watching the consequences. Colleagues abandon him, clients disappear and the comfortable professional world he has built begins collapsing around him.

So rather than asking whether Jerry can become a decent human being, the film asks what happens when a fundamentally decent man decides he no longer wants to play by the rules of an indecent system.

That’s potentially more interesting. But, the problem is that the stakes can occasionally feel rather artificial. We’re dealing with extremely wealthy sports stars and multimillion-dollar contracts. When everybody is arguing about whether somebody is receiving enough millions of dollars, the film has to work rather hard to convince us that this is ultimately about human values rather than rich people arguing about money.

And that contradiction is embodied brilliantly by the one major client who actually sticks with Jerry. Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), is the football player responsible for the film’s most famous demand: ‘Show me the money!’

It’s one of the great ironies of ‘Jerry Maguire’. Jerry leaves his company because he has decided that life shouldn’t be entirely about money, only to find himself dependent upon a client who spends much of the film demanding more of it.

Jerry wants to put people before profit. Rod wants to get paid. So the two men remain together for almost completely opposite reasons. But gradually their relationship becomes the film’s most convincing expression of Jerry’s original mission statement. Jerry has only one major athlete left, which means he actually has to know him. Rod stops being an entry on a client roster and becomes a person whose family, ambitions, insecurities and frustrations Jerry has to understand.

The professional relationship becomes a friendship. And perhaps that’s where Jerry’s conversion really takes place.

Then there’s Dorothy (Renée Zellweger), the single mother who believes in Jerry’s mission statement and leaves the company with him.

Their relationship turns ‘Jerry Maguire’ into something approaching a romantic comedy, and at times it anticipates ‘As Good as It Gets’, released the following year. In both films, we have two people whom the conventions of Hollywood romance tell us should end up together, but the film keeps placing obstacles between them before allowing that to happen.

The difference is that I’m not always sure what the obstacles between Jerry and Dorothy actually are. Dorothy clearly loves him. Jerry clearly cares about her and her son. They are attracted to one another. The film nevertheless needs them to move apart before they can come back together, because that’s what this kind of story requires.

And Jerry’s relationship with Dorothy raises the same question as his professional crisis. What exactly does he have to learn?

A conventional redemption story would give us a selfish man who gradually discovers how to love another person. But Jerry doesn’t seem incapable of love. He isn’t cruel to Dorothy. He doesn’t spend the film behaving appallingly and then suddenly realise what he has lost. He’s essentially a nice man who is confused.

That makes the famous romantic conclusion both effective and slightly strange. ‘You complete me’ has become one of the most quoted lines in modern romantic cinema, but I’m not entirely sure Jerry is incomplete in the way the film wants us to believe.

Perhaps that’s why the film feels less like a redemption story than an existential crisis. Jerry has achieved everything his culture told him to want: money, status, professional success and access to glamorous people. Then he asks the dangerous question: Is this it?

That’s the real beginning of ‘Jerry Maguire’. And perhaps Cameron Crowe deserves some credit for putting the crisis of conscience at the beginning rather than saving it for the conclusion. Most films would spend two hours teaching Jerry that his life is empty. ‘Jerry Maguire’ has him realize that almost immediately and then spends the rest of the film asking what happens when you actually try to live according to that revelation.

The answer is messy. Jerry doesn’t undergo some enormous dark night of the soul. He remains recognizably Tom Cruise throughout: smiling, wearing the sunglasses, charming people and pursuing Renée Zellweger.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt slightly distanced from the film. It has all the ingredients of a great redemption narrative without quite having a character who requires redemption. And yet perhaps that’s also what makes ‘Jerry Maguire’ more interesting than a straightforward morality tale.

Jerry isn’t transformed from a bad man into a good one. He’s a successful man who begins to wonder whether success has been defined incorrectly. By the end, he hasn’t rejected money, sport, ambition or even the industry itself. He’s still a sports agent. His client still wants to be paid. Jerry still wants to succeed.

What has changed is the scale on which he operates and the value he places on individual relationships. Perhaps, then, the mission statement isn’t really about transforming Jerry at all.

It’s about stripping away everything around him until he’s forced to discover which relationships actually matter. And that may explain the central paradox of ‘Jerry Maguire’: in so many ways, it might have been a more dramatically satisfying film if Tom Cruise’s character weren’t the focus. But the film only works because he is.