I wish the film version of John Grisham's "The Firm" could be eradicated from memory and redone. For some reason they ignored the events of the book and made up their own version, which was too awful to describe.
The annoying thing is that this is his best book and the film versions of his other books have been reasonably good, yet they completely lost the plot (quite literally) with this one.
Sheriff
Interesting that you mention Grisham. Now, I've seen the films but haven't read the books - but it always seemed to me as if the Grisham agenda was to try and take the idea of the legal drama, and remove it from the rather obvious setting, namely the courtroom.
The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client were all legal thrillers that had virtually no courtroom time at all. The Firm I found to be almost incomprehensible (perhaps a mini-series would have been better, there was clearly too much going on for one film); the Pelican Brief was better but still too long. The Client I thought was a step further in improvement, being similar to the Pelican Brief, but at least half an hour shorter (Two and a half hours is too long for a legal thriller.)
However, then "A Time to Kill" came out, which I thought was a far superior film to any other Grisham movie. Cast to perfection, and a gripping story.
Is it any coincidence that it was the first Grisham adaptation that was actually based in the courtroom?
Since then we've had a few more, and again the non-courtroom varieties (The Chamber, The Gingerbread Man) have fared worse than the plain-and-simple courtroom dramas (The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury).
Perhaps there's something to be said for keeping it in the courtroom...?
Well you seem to have missed the really bad Christmas with the Kranks, which is a movie version of Skipping Christmas. I loved that book it was really funny.
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