Rotten Tomatoes Says This Is The Best John Grisham Movie Adaptation

For a moment in the 1990s, adapting a John Grisham novel into a movie was akin to printing money. It all started with "The Firm," a film that had the good fortune of coming along just as its leading man, Tom Cruise, was really hitting his stride that decade thanks to "A Few Good Men." Of course, it helped that the 1993 legal thriller also paired Tommy C (who, naturally, spends most of the climax sprinting with a briefcase) with the dream team of director Sydney Pollack, writer Robert Towne, and a killer supporting cast featuring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Wilford Brimley, and the ever-on-point Gene Hackman.

(Fun fact: "The Firm" is also the flick Aubrey Plaza's character is watching as she practices her meat-beating skills in "The To Do List." If having your movie serve as the punchline in a teen sex romp isn't something all filmmakers aspire to, then I dunno what we're even doing.)

On top of striking box office gold, Pollack's picture added the veneer of high art to Grisham's name, all the while retaining the pulpy page-turning pleasures of his source material. Because of this, it wasn't long before other venerated filmmakers — folks like Alan J. Pakula, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman — started putting their own stamps on Grisham's implausible yet entertaining best-sellers (or, in Altman's case, one of the lawyer turned wordsmith's unpublished manuscripts). 

Hence, if you ask any two people what their favorite Grisham adaptation is, you're bound to get different answers. Some might adore "The Pelican Brief" for the unfulfilled romance between Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington's protagonists, while others — the chap who sold me my car, for example — may throw you for a loop and swear by the Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis led holiday farce "Christmas with the Kranks." If you look at Rotten Tomatoes, however, there's a clear winner in this debate.

By the time 1997 rolled around, the Grisham cinematic brand was starting to lose its luster. A year earlier, the big-screen take on the author's death penalty thriller book "The Chamber" had proven to be an unqualified disaster and was roundly condemned by practically all concerned parties, Grisham included. The Grisham legal thriller formula — a young, idealistic practitioner of the law finds themself in over their head — was steadily wearing thin too, having already been recycled some half a dozen times in four years.

Coppola's "The Rainmaker," which also arrived on the heels of the filmmaker's own nadir, the 1996 fiasco that was "Jack," provided a fitting antidote to Grisham fatigue. Matt Damon, then on the verge of his career-making success with "Good Will Hunting," starred as Rudy S. Baylor, an upstanding Memphis law school grad who's still wet behind the ears when he argues the case of a lifetime. The movie itself still had most of Grisham's favorite tropes, but dropped the elaborate conspiracies and killers-for-hire found in the author's biggest hits. Instead, "The Rainmaker" pit its hero against a much more relatable and despicable opponent: a greedy insurance company that refused to help cover a live-saving operation for a young man with leukemia. (An effectively melodramatic subplot saw Damon's good guy fall for a domestic abuse victim, played by Claire Danes, as well.)

For his part, Coppola generally avoids stylistic flourishes here in favor of staging the courtroom drama with a sure and steady hand. But the thing that really makes "The Rainmaker" one of the best Grisham adaptations is its focus on the colorful players in Rudy's orbit. With Danny DeVito playing Rudy's far savvier and more practical partner, Jon Voight sliming it up as the scheming legal opposition, Mickey Rourke popping in as Rudy's charmingly sleazy first boss, and Danny Glover portraying the crusading civil rights attorney turned judge who goes above and beyond to help Damon's protagonist, the movie's got a great cast firing on all cylinders.

Critics noticed, too, as evidenced by the movie's 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes (a high point for Grisham adaptations on the site) and its critical consensus: "Invigorated by its talented cast and Francis Ford Coppola's strong direction, 'The Rainmaker' is a satisfying legal drama — and arguably the best of Hollywood's many John Grisham adaptations." That wasn't enough to reverse Grisham's downward trend at the box office (the film only made $47 million in theaters on a $40 million budget), but as "The Rainmaker" itself reminds everyone, some things are just more important than money will ever be.