Title: John Grisam's The Rainmaker Director: Francis Ford Coppola Starring: Matt Damon, Claire Danes, Jon Voight Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Studio: Paramount Pictures Genre(s): Drama Rated:       (For a strong beating and elements of domestic abuse)   Buy From Amazon.com: Not yet available.

CONSUMER ADVICE

Parents, aside from some mild violence and language this is a otherwise fine for kids. Recommended for ages 10 and up.

Court room drama’s are a dime-a-dozen. Most of the time I don’t find them particularly involving or entertaining to watch, mainly because while the movies are almost always dripping with tension and anxiety, I find them to be manipulative most of the time. Now my mom, my mom loves these movies. She’s loves this subject. She spends most of her time watching Judge Judy, every incarnation of “Law & Order” and “CSI” there is, as well as those Oprah special where the overrated talk show host slams corporations for not taking care of the smaller income families (ironic since Oprah once gave every member in the audience a free car only to have most of the audience give it back because they couldn’t pay the taxes on it). I bring this up not only to give my mom some much needed attention, but to point out that this genre is incredibly easy to make a movie on.

Heck, it’s done on TV on a weekly basis, sometimes daily. The best court room dramas normally feature characters we can relate to, and the movie isn’t about the court battle itself, but what the defendant has at stake should he/she lose. While “The Rainmaker” may be based on one of John Grisams most popular books, and directed by one of our finest directors, Francis Ford Coppola (Academy Award winning director of “The Godfather”), the movie had me wishing I was watching “A Few Good Men” instead. “The Rainmaker” revolves around Rudy Baylor (Academy Award winner Matt Damon in one of his first major roles), a young man who is in love with the law. He’s always been fascinated by lawyers who were able to bring change to the world, and he also wants to bring change to the world (that and because he wants to tick off his dad, who hates lawyers).

Rudy just passes the bar when he is offered a case: A woman’s son was denied an operation that would have saved his life from an insurance agency named Great Benefit. Though inexperienced, Rudy is helped by friend Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), who has failed to pass the bar six times. Meanwhile, as Rudy so dully notes, Great Benefit has a team of lawyers who seem to have at least a hundred years of experience under their belts. Not the least of which is Leo F. Drummond (Academy Award winner Jon Voight), who offers Rudy $75,000 to settle the case, a sum Rudy considers offensively low. This all sounds fairly well written on paper, and I was curious to see how it would all play out. But I’m sad to say the movie makes a few fairly fatal mistakes.

The first mistake it makes is about the case itself. The son who was sick dies before the case makes it to court, and once at court his family isn’t in the picture as much as they should be. The few moments they have to testify are there, and they are heartbreaking, but the situation is so dire it would be heartbreaking even if we didn’t spend any time with the family at all. The second fatal mistake is the fact that the movie brings in a love interest named Kelly Riker (Clair Danes), whose husband is beating her. Rudy does what he can to help her out of that horrible situation, but then the Kelly situation starts being a distraction to the movie. Whenever the case starts to gain momentum the movie has to pause as Rudy helps Kelly out. Since the chemistry between the two characters isn’t as believable or as convincing as it should be, I think Coppola would have been better off to cut this storyline from the movie.

The final mistake is that the movie is, you guessed it, horribly manipulative. Not only is it manipulative, but it seems confused about what the audience wants to care about. The court scenes divert from the case about the boy, and seem to become more and more about the Damon and Voight characters trying to outsmart each other. This is no doubt what lawyers do, but once the family gets sidestepped in the debates I found it harder and harder to care about the whole affair. Likewise Matt Damon, who is usually a good actor, doesn’t seem to have the backbone to win a case like this. Whether he wins or not is besides the point, but this fact makes it difficult believe the ending when it finally roles around. All in all though, I must say “The Rainmaker” is quite fun to watch. Fun to watch, that is, if you were watching it on TV for free.