Word: client
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opening scene of "The Client" shows Mark (Brad Renfro) teaching his eight-year-old brother Ricky (David Speck) how to smoke behind a trailer-park outside Memphis. Only a few smokes later, Mark has a chance encounter with the suicidal lawyer, Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz), that sweeps his family into a plot of Mafia intrigue, federal investigation, and a legal battle who outcome may determine the family's future. Sound like a compelling beginning...
Eleven-year-old Mark Sway's accidental involvement in the suicide of a New Orleans Mafia lawyer leads him to "all kinds of trouble" in the first chapter of John Grisham's "The Client." In producer Joel Schumacher's adaptation of the novel (also "The Client"), however, it is the screenplay's disinvolvement from the opening-scene suicide and its "bloody and explosive secret" that causes the film "all kinds of trouble...
...summer which has presented surprisingly few of the requisite mediocre-but-big-box-office sequels, "The Client" perhaps comes closest to fitting the bill. Interestingly, the film suffers most, not in its attempt to mix new elements into a proven formula (Grisham does attempt to give his novel an original setting and a fresh narrative), but rather in its attempt to college formulaic material into an exciting new story...
With the Mafia lawyer's suicide, Grisham begins "The Client" where he ends "The Firm." The author presents us with another Memphis legal story with the familiar players: the Government, the Mafia, their legal representatives, and the young hero with the damning evidence who successfully takes on the other three. Has Grisham's genius matured in "The Client...
...Grisham's attempt to distance his novel from The Firm's slick legal plot actually compromises the novel's success, Schumacher's pious adherence to the dramatic material of the novel--the Sway melodrama--significantly reduces "The Client"'s suspense potential. By the time Jones first appears (almost 15 minutes into the film as U.S. District Attorney Roy Foltrigg), we are beginning to wonder whether the "explosive secret" that Mark has learned is really important or whether the local authorities simply find the kid a good person to harass. With Jones on the screen as the ambitious and disgustingly smooth...