Surprisingly light fare

I expected something a lot darker from Coppola, but the film was actually quite light-hearted, sweet and often comedic.

I thought our young hero was going to have some serious moral challenges along the way, but he’s basically a good kid who never even flirts with doing the wrong thing. No Michael Corleone wrestling with his soul here.

Dramatic tension was pretty tame since the bad guys were clearly going to lose the case, they were almost cartoonishly evil and no jury was going to side with them. Hell, even the judge had it in for them.

As a courtroom drama it had few of the impressively clever lawyer tricks we saw in the gold standard of the genre - A Few Good Men. And plot contrivances like Virgina Madsen’s character just appear out of nowhere to bolster Damon’s already solid case.

It was all quite plodding and slow (did we really need the Claire Danes subplot?) and didn’t need to be 2.5 hours, but there was an undeniable charm and the characters were likeable. Damon was just really nice to his clients and they instantly became like family to him, and he kinda sailed through the court case even though he barely had a clue what he was doing 🤷🏻‍♂️

I guess the ending added a somewhat bittersweet twist to things.