Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Young lawyer finds himself suing a giant insurance company while helping a battered wife.
Biased, pithy comments: So, Coppola is good, real good. His actors are excellent, and his choice of shots and mixing of the future, past, and present are both neat. And certainly, this is an absorbing film; I wanted to find out what happened. But, like many of Grisham's novels, the profound insights we are supposed to learn aren't much more than conventional wisdom---did you know that lawyers are caught between their own ethics and doing the best they can for their clients? Why, they're like...mercenaries! I shouldn't be so sarcastic, but I found that the populist sentiments and careworn characters (delightfully played, I will admit) left me cold. It also bugged me that professional, thousand-dollar-an-hour guys flinch when their opponents bring up some unexpected, damaging evidence. They are paid to be the coolest cucumbers on Earth---why would these guys flinch? Watch it for the legal potboiler aspect, but not for anything else.
Other Notes: Your mileage may vary. I still don't have a favorite Grisham movie. Yep, that's the same Jon Voight as seen in ``Anaconda.'' He does get around.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Matt Damon, Danny DeVito, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Mary Kay Place.
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola