The Rainmaker (1997)

Long ago... = something like 20 years (damn, I'm getting old...) there was a trend of John Grisham adaptations - "The Firm", "The Client", "The Pelican Brief" are probably among the best known, which also had good box-office at the time, but were not the only ones. The author of the novels is apparently a quite prolific writer in the genre of legal thrillers, which seems it's rather off the Hollywood priorities list since quite a while... the last big screen movie with his name under story was "Runaway Jury" from 2003 (otherwise a very good movie from what I can recall). "The Rainmaker" is one of the titles that weren't so high profile at the time, despite an all-star cast, and also eluded my watched movie list 'til recently.

The action is set in Memphis, Tennessee, for most of it, and here you can probably give some credit to the movie for the specific feel of Southern US, or on the contrary for keeping the stereotype (since I've never passed by there I can't choose the right option). We have a lawyer who just passed the bar exam (a very young Matt Damon), who at his first more serious case must go against an insurance company that denied repeatedly covering the treatment for a patient with terminal leukemia. That's the main story thread, besides it having a couple more cases that bring a romance element, an unfinished context of a shady law firm with a boss running from the feds, and a Danny de Vito in a secondary role to spice up the atmosphere. Moving back to the main story, I wouldn't say more that unfortunately is weaker than all of the ones enumerated above. There's a war going between the lawyer at a first case and his much more experienced counterpart (Jon Voight as devious counselor), involving lots of shenanigans, but something's not there...

The director is Francis Ford Coppola and at some point in all the shady-law-firms-mafia entanglement I felt a bit of "Godfather", but it faded away quickly. Overall, the movie left me a bit of a salad impression, where we have a couple mini-stories just to fill up space, but distracting the attention from the main topic, although without these we'd still have an issue.. the result probably being way too shallow to make it into a movie. Honestly, even though in a pretty different genre, I think that "My Cousin Vinny" was much better put together for the legal "thriller" part compared with what I've seen here...

Rating: 3 out of 5