The Pelican Brief Review

The second of John Grisham’s best-selling page-turners to reach the screen is satisfactorily ripping, gripping Friday night out stuff, with director Alan J. Pakula returning to his good old conspiracy thriller form. It also sees Julia Roberts squarely back in the star business, prettily watchable as sharp-witted law student Darby Shaw, whose speculative brief offering a fatefully bang-on-target theory on the who and why behind the mind-blowing assassination of two US Supreme Court Justices falls into the wrong hands and makes her the prey in a cross-country chase by the FBI, CIA and sundry freelance friends. Handicapped by some structural shakiness that keeps him off screen too often and for too long, Denzel Washington coolly does the manly support bit as Washington D.C. investigative reporter Gray Grantham who eventually hooks up with her to get his scoop. Like The Firm, this is a starry, big buck exercise in amateur sleuthing, law, corruption, sudden death, spooky surveillance and evasion of capture, very true to the book this time and extremely well cast (with Sam Shepard as Darby's boozehound law professor lover, John Heard as his FBI chum, Stanley Tucci as super-assassin Khamel, Tony Goldwyn as a power mad White House Chief of Staff, Robert Gulp as a doltish right wing US President to relish, and John Lithgow as Gray's editor). Essentially glossy tosh with a way-out but sexily paranoiac promise, this has a few stand-out nail-biting set pieces (although the scariest revelation is John Heard's whale of a waistline!) and Julia is as bright as Jerry the Mouse at staying alive, though ever within reach of the cat's paw (the crucial lesson here: when you're on the run, don't pay with plastic).