Word: grisham
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...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...
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...
Jerome Clifford's creative death scene in the opening chapter seems tantamount to Grisham confessing that nothing more can be written about the tainted attorneys of "The Firm" and the crime network they represented; indeed, the author labors nearly 564 pages convincing us he is not simply writing another legal thriller. Instead of the brilliant young lawyer, Mitch McDeer (played by Tom Cruise in "The Firm"), the novel's hero is a cigarette-smoking 11-year-old; in place of the Firm's boardroom, the setting is working-class Memphis. Nevertheless, the similarities remain, and Grisham ultimately leaves the reader...