Word: grisham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...that features Susan Sarandon ("Bull Durham," "Thelma and Louise") and Tommy Lee Jones '69 ("The Fugitive"), along with a terrific debut performance from 10-year-old Tennessee street kid Brad Renfro, it would seem that Schumacher couldn't go wrong. Nevertheless, the director's painfully close adherence to the Grisham script fails to inspire...
...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...
While the sequence could potentially jumpstart the otherwise lackluster Grisham plot (and comes close to doing so in the novel), Schumacher's roadster fails to start. Launching instead into an expatiated look at the Sway family and their unsolicited entanglement with the local authorities, a New Orleans crime family, and ultimately the federal justice system, Schumacher delivers a slowed-down, scaled-down production which loses its inspiration almost as soon as Clifford takes his own life...
...John Grisham's serious novel about the death penalty...