Not bad at all. I personally didn’t like the ending, but it might for some others. Lots of character actors and small time players featured as well. Hackman and Hoffman were very good. I thought Hoffman was miscast in Confidence, he’s much better here.
It’s definately worth matinee price. Saw it with a packed house (surprisingly) @ a friday matinee.
Well color me surprised when the movie dealt with an entire different case than the book did!
It probably was a good decision, dying of emphysema and lung cancer isn’t a sexaaay way to go.
I liked the flick a lot, one of the better Grisham-novels-to-movies. Then again, I liked The Pelican Brief, so your mileage may vary.
They probably thought going after big tobacco was old news. Going after guns must be the sexy bad guys now.
I liked it, but I like everything with John Cusack.
I didn’t find it close enough to the book, one of Grisham’s best , IMO, for my taste.
They also changed unnecessarily, what was an extremely clever and elegant ending to the book :(
The book was written before the big tobacco case closed, at the time the idea was that this would be the first win against big tobacco, and the rest was the cat and mouse between the relevant parties. The switch to guns was a good idea, unlike, say, Sum of All Fears switching bad guys. Well, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, all the anti-gun company cases ran out of steam really quickly.
I didn’t mind the bad guy switch in Sum of All Fears (I would have picked someone else though). I thought the nuclear bomb plot in the novel was so stupid the way it was set up that I welcomed some kind of change to it.
Stupidest bad guy switch of all time was in Blood Work last year.
Pray tell what was so cool about the ending of the book? Or are you just talking about the swich from tobacco to guns?
I just saw this today and will weigh in on the side of those that enjoyed it. Not a great movie, but not a bad movie either. I love Hackman and he turned in another great performance. As did Hoffman and the rest of the cast. No really glaring gotchas, either. I thought the plot held together pretty well, although I’m no lawyer.
Stupidest bad guy switch of all time was in Blood Work last year.[/quote]
Who was the badguy in blood work (saw the movie, didn’t read the book)
Pray tell what was so cool about the ending of the book? Or are you just talking about the swich from tobacco to guns?
I just saw this today and will weigh in on the side of those that enjoyed it. Not a great movie, but not a bad movie either. I love Hackman and he turned in another great performance. As did Hoffman and the rest of the cast. No really glaring gotchas, either. I thought the plot held together pretty well, although I’m no lawyer.[/quote]
Well, I thought it was neat that not only did they do the doublecross after getting the money for a defense verdict, but they multiplied their money by
shorting tobacco stock .
Ah, that is a cool ending. I bet they dropped it because most people don’t understand how shorting works. If you thought the only way to make money with securities is for the stock to go up, then you’d miss the point.
Odd, but as much as I enjoyed the book, I disliked the ending of it. It was so very clever, but it seemed rushed. I would have liked more details about how Marlee learned of “the fund”, a little more detail when Fitch finally knew he was screwed, that sort of thing.
Good book, good movie, I’m just being whiney.