Another in the line of adaptations of John Grisham's dragon-slaying fairy tales for the morally complacent and self-congratulatory. In this one there are actually two dragons. Number one is a scamming insurance company that preys on the poor and dispatches a battalion of nattily attired attorneys against the idealistic young hero on his first case ("I'm alone in this trial, I'm seriously outgunned, and I'm scared. But I'm right"), a case that closely resembles the non-Grisham one of The Verdict, all the way down to the punitive damages. Number two is an all but faceless wife-beater who represents to the hero his own brutish father as well as the ogre guarding the gate to the fair princess. Artistically pretentious even when most abjectly commercial, Francis Ford Coppola can deceive himself that he is providing directorial "vision" when he conducts the trial in semi-darkness. And the tone, to put him up as more sophisticated than his formulaic source material, is predominantly lighter and jokier than in prior Grisham adaptations. Matt Damon, Danny DeVito, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Danny Glover, Mickey Rourke, Mary Kay Place, Virginia Madsen. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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