‘The Rainmaker’ Review: A Legal Thriller Stripped of Its Bite

In the 1990s, Hollywood couldn’t get enough of adapting John Grisham novels, a writer whose specialty was legal thrillers. Films like The Pelican Brief, The Client, and A Time to Kill emerged from that factory of accessible, mainstream entertainment which—thanks largely to their casts and directors—also carried a certain veneer of prestige. One of the last films to come out of that cycle was directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997: The Rainmaker. Starring a then little-known Matt Damon and backed by a remarkable supporting cast that included Mickey Rourke, Danny DeVito, Jon Voight, Claire Danes, Danny Glover, and Roy Scheider, it was a solid thriller with a sharply critical view of the justice system and, above all, of corporations that profit from people’s health.

That attempt to balance popular entertainment with a layer of prestige may have been part of the thinking behind revisiting The Rainmaker as a TV series, but in practice only the former survives. This adaptation retains little of the professional polish, the cast quality, or the critical edge of either the novel or the film. Instead, it delivers a very basic, easily digestible story that borrows some familiar elements while adding new ones, ultimately playing out as a hybrid of soap opera and thriller—no longer purely a legal drama, but one that incorporates plotlines far removed from the original material.

The starting point is similar. In South Carolina, Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan) has just graduated from law school and lands a job at the prestigious firm Tinly Britt, run by Leo Drummond (played by John Slattery—Roger Sterling from Mad Men, for those keeping score). After a tense incident on his very first day, he’s promptly fired. Shut out by other top firms, Rudy ends up working for one of those disreputable lawyers known in legal slang as “ambulance chasers.” The firm’s owner, Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone (Lana Parrilla), hires him reluctantly and pairs him with Deck Shifflet (P. J. Byrne), a longtime employee who has far more street smarts than formal credentials.

Their firm eventually takes on Dot Black, an African American woman suing the hospital where her son went in with the flu and never came out alive. Representing the hospital, predictably, is Tinly Britt. Complicating matters further, Rudy’s girlfriend Sarah (Madison Iseman) works at that same firm. From there, the series branches out into two additional subplots: one involving a neighbor of Rudy’s who is being psychologically and physically abused by her husband, and another centered on Melvin, a hospital nurse who seems to be using his medical knowledge for decidedly criminal purposes.

How all of this connects becomes clear over the course of the season’s ten long episodes. While the core storyline loosely follows the contours of the film, the series’ approach is far more simplistic and superficial. From the cinematography and staging to the dialogue, humor, music, and even the sex scenes, it’s evident that this version of The Rainmaker doesn’t take itself very seriously. The harsh legal battle between powerful law firms and more “populist” operators—and, by extension, between ordinary people and massive healthcare corporations—feels less like the heart of the story than a convenient pretext for lightweight entertainment with very little real substance.

When Bruiser—who in the film was male and played by Mickey Rourke—declares in the third episode something along the lines of “I only need three things: Kentucky bourbon, a good steak, and a man who doesn’t spend the night with me,” while casting a sultry look at an FBI agent, no further explanation is necessary. The same goes for a scene in which Rudy and Sarah have sex in a kitchen during a break from the bar exam. The soundtrack, dominated by country songs, is similarly heavy-handed, bursting in loudly and often without any clear connection to what’s happening onscreen. Almost everything else follows suit. Dramatic, tonal, and even acting consistency are in short supply. What remains is a string of would-be “impact” scenes, loosely stitched together. And that’s about it.

It’s clear that Slattery—barely trying—operates on a different level, and whenever he appears, the series briefly comes to life. Beyond that, there’s little to hold on to, especially once the show begins to drift away from legal drama and toward territory more typical of serial-killer narratives and their gruesome behavior. It’s striking that the series makes no real effort to engage with the contemporary relevance of Grisham’s themes—healthcare was a major issue in the 1990s and remains one today—leaving the story far more generic and less pointed than it could have been. Perhaps the creators chose not to “disturb” part of their audience by touching on politically charged issues. The result is an anodyne, conventional series: inoffensive, but never truly compelling.