The backstory that occupies several chapters of the novel is squeezed into five minutes of narration and montage as the movie opens. Matt Damon plays Rudy Baylor, a Memphis law student on the brink of the bar exam who takes a job with a sleazy, ambulance-chasing firm headed by "Bruiser" Stone (an almost unrecognizable Mickey Rourke). He has a bead on a contingency case, a lawsuit against a health insurance firm by the family of a leukemia patient. When his boss skips town one step ahead of the feds, Baylor and his partner Dick Shifflett (Danny DeVito) are left alone to battle the high-priced lawyers of the insurance company, led by the evil Jon Voight.

This central plot line would be compelling on its own, especially since it demonstrates Baylor's inexperience, idealism, and disillusionment with the system. But Coppola chose to leave in fragments of Grisham's subplots, such as a widow cutting her kids out of her will. Most distracting is Baylor's love interest, a young abused wife played by Claire Danes. The insurance trial has little enough momentum as it is, thanks to John Toll's flat, underlit cinematography and static compositions. When it's interrupted every few minutes by violence and heartache that barely affect the main story, the movie seems twice as long and twice as slow.

Just a few more script revisions, it seems, and The Rainmaker would have been a serviceable legal drama. Instead, the revisions happened in the editing room, resulting in an erratic lurch from comedy to melodrama without warning. Elmer Bernstein's laughable score tries to keep up with the shifts in tone by stealing stingers from Dallas and My Three Sons--even island rhythms when a beach scene suddenly appears.