Directed by David Miller

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Predecessor to Oliver Stone's 'JFK' this film was one of the first to present an alternative to the Warren Report version of events. Mixing narriative segments with newsreel footage, the film tells the story of a group of powerful men who plot the assasination. First they must recruit and train a shooter, then frame Lee Harvey Oswald. A must-see for history buffs and conspiracy theorists, some credit this film with re-opening the debate about Kennedy's assasination.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19477 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Model: 117747
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 91 minutes

Features

• Predecessor to Oliver Stone's 'JFK' this film was one of the first to present an alternative to the Warren Report version of events. Mixing narriative segments with newsreel footage, the film tells the story of a group of powerful men who plot the assasination. First they must recruit and train a shooter, then frame Lee Harvey Oswald. A must-see for history buffs and conspiracy theorists, some cre

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
As JFK-conspiracy movies go, Executive Action is distinguished by being one of the earliest and one of the best. This speculative drama draws together some of the theories floating around in 1973 and lay them out in dry, unadorned fashion. At the center of the conspiracy is a group of right-wing muckymucks who quietly plan the assassination of the president (thanks to their fears about Vietnam, civil rights, and whatever else might be handy). Burt Lancaster is the most prominent name in the cast, although the film gets much of its gravity from the weathered presence of Robert Ryan, the superb character actor who died not long after completing the project. Will Geer and John Anderson are also in on the plot. Scripted by Hollywood pro (and former blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, the film is unrelentingly grim, but there's something about its very flatness that makes it that much eerier. Oliver Stone would take the opposite approach in his pinwheeling JFK, but this simple accounting is just as creepy. --Robert Horton

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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Chillingly On Target!
By Mcgivern Owen L
Executive Action is about the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The title refers to covert organizations euphemism for selected killings. Distinctions are important because EA does not try to prove that a deadly plot existed. EA is ABOUT the conspiracy itself! The pace is slow and chillingly deliberate. The film is totally free of excess and editorial. The conspirators are so calm, the dialog so matter of fact that the viewer could almost be eavesdropping on casual conversation between friends. Their motivation lay in Kennedy s failure to fully support the Bay of Pigs invasion, a nuclear treaty with Russia and his support of Civil Rights. Then there is Topic # 1-J.F.K.s apparent (!) intention to begin withdrawing troops from Vietnam in 1965. Profits decline in peacetime! Two veteran actors, Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster are the right wing fanatics who decide to take 'Executive action" against the President. Both are excellent, especially the cynical Ryan. It is their calm "everyone is expendable" iciness that bites to the bone. They have "Done this Before". To them there is no difference between eliminating JFK or dispatching a troublesome Third World dictator. These string-pullers calmly put together a hit team as casually as forming a new finance department. There are two significant details: 1) there were not 1 but 3 shooters in Dallas that day and 2) the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald is treated as an unplanned afterthought. A strong point is the intermingling of historical documentary form the early 60s, which gives EA body and context. A weak point is the supporting cast. The supposedly professional assassins look liked they were drafted from the company softball team. The role of strip club owner Jack Ruby would be laughable if he had not been so important in real life. EA is a first rate low key film that failed to win recognition when it was first released. Conspiracy fans and conspiracy haters alike are encouraged to watch EA. Those who can?t learn anything will at least be entertained. A final thought. EA would have been ideal for a black and white format. It's curious the producers chose to colorize such a somber film.

85 of 98 people found the following review helpful.
Overlooked but far more persuasive than JFK
By Jeffrey Ellis
Executive Action is a stark, low budget docudrama about the assasination of John F. Kennedy. We watch as a cabal of old, rich white man plot the death of JFK and, in a starkly matter-of-fact way, the film details how they pulled it off. As opposed to Oliver Stone's later JFK, Executive Action goes to great pains to remain a rather cold recreation. Though this makes the film far more somber than Stone's, it also makes for a far more persuasive case. By not sensationalizing or resorting to emotional trickey, Executive Action forces you to consider the evidence for a conspiracy and, even if you're a skeptic like me, by the end of this film, you have to admit that there is a great deal of credible, if circumstancial, evidence to support the idea of a conspiracy. The conspirators, themselves, are deliberately kept obscure. We learn little about their backgrounds or individual personalities and, while some might complain that Executive Action doesn't contain any performances as crazed as say Joe Pesci in Stone's film, it actually works to help Executive Action avoid the hysterically paranoid feeling that Stone wallowed in. Whereas I think JFK ultimately caused more people to dismiss the idea of a conspiracy than accept it, Executive Action is powerfully persuasive. Every effort has been made to maintain a sense of realism. As well, Executive Action features the final performance of the great Robert Ryan. Though, unlike co-star Burt Lancaster, Ryan's become somewhat forgotten today, he was one of the braver movie actors working in the Hollywood of the '40s and '50s. He was a committed activist who was willing to take chances with his films if he believed in the message. Its obvious that this was a project that both he and Lancaster felt very deeply about and there's something gratifying in the fact that both of these very missed actors managed to create a message movie that actually manages to persuasively argue for its message. Lancaster and Ryan were represenatives of a courage that doesn't seem to have survived in today's Hollywood and, whether you agree with them or not, its hard not to respect the body of work they fought so hard to create.

I have to admit that I've never been a big believer in conspiracy theories. I've never believed there were aliens hidden away in government hangars, never feared the Trialateral Commission, and I've always thought that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Call me a skeptic but I've always felt that conspiracy theories draw their strength from people being too frightened to accept that on the whole, we're all at the mercy of random fate. That being said, let me also admit that if any film could convince me to reexamine my disbelief, it would have to be Executive Action.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Maltin bombed on this one
By Dan
I almost didn't watch this movie when I saw Leonard Maltin had rated it a "Bomb," but I'm glad I did. I agree that the pace early on could have been quicker, but overall the movie presented its theory pretty well.

While JFK was a mystery investigating a murder, this is a step-by-step recreation of how the crime might have happened. I'm not a conspiracy buff, and I felt this film presented some of the theories more clearly than did JFK, and seemed to make a better attempt at staying historically accurate

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356384 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-09-01
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Running time: 130 minutes

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Jack Slater is an action-film hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. An old projectionist (Robert Prosky) hands a magic movie ticket to Jack's biggest preteen fan (Austin O'Brien), and the kid steps right inside the latest Jack Slater film, becoming the actor star's sidekick in gunfights and car chases. But when Jack's nemesis (Charles Dance) gets his hands on the ticket, the fight busts out into the real world and Jack (à la Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear) refuses to believe he's a fictional character. Director John McTiernan churns some nifty scenes out of this setup, although the fiction-to-reality shuffle is not as deft as in, say, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the plot needs the kind of logic and discipline found in that classic when-worlds-collide film Back to the Future. Still, Schwarzenegger has moments of wit and smashing action, and we get a faux-movie trailer advertising an intriguing new shoot-'em-up: "Something's rotten in the State of Denmark--and Hamlet is taking out the trash!"

From The New Yorker
Here's a new idea: a thriller where the thrills lead nowhere. A boy called Danny (Austin O'Brien), bored at school and frightened at home, is enthralled by the screen exploits of Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger). With the help of a magic ticket, he crosses into Jack's world: an unreal place where the hero always wins under a roasting sun and never gets more than a flesh wound. His adversaries may look like clichés-Charles Dance as a quiet hit man; Anthony Quinn, in his traditional look-at-me mode, as a Sicilian mobster-but that is precisely the point; movie conventions exist to be mocked, and "Last Action Hero" is determined to have fun with them. There isn't a trace of acid; the director, John McTiernan, remains devoted to the genre that he mastered in "Die Hard." But the scattiness of the film-the way that it slips between fact and fiction, and fidgets from one gag to the next-may still be enough to shake the confidence of a young audience brought up on Schwarzenegger pictures; everything they used to believe in, all the toy violence and dizzy stuntwork, is being snapped back in their faces. The movie labors the point and outstays its welcome; but it's a bright and daring direction for Schwarzenegger to have taken, and therefore one that he may live to regret. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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43 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Clever "inside" humor, but DVD has a BIG flaw
By John S. Harris
I think I know why this film was so poorly received and tanked at the box office. It was TOO "inside". Much of this film is a series of jokes about the standard, conventional, formulaic, bombastic action film genre. But the humor was so tongue-in-cheek so often that it probably didn't bode well with the average action-junkie film fan. "Last Action Hero" made fun of itself as it unfolded, and one would need a certain sense of humor to fully appreciate it on its intended level. I dare say that most folks who went to this film just didn't "get it". Too bad for them.
The major flaw of the DVD is that the film is presented in the god-awful Pan and Scan format. Pan and Scan presentations of frenetically-shot widescreen films should be outlawed, it's just that simple. You almost get a headache watching this P&S version. The digital pan is so obtrusive and distracting that it can drive one to anger! It pulls you out of the film, to say the least. I like (but don't really love) this film, and the low price of the DVD makes the purchase a no-brainer. But it is too optically uncomfortable to watch in P&S.
Release it in widescreen and all will be okay.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Watch and NOT be disappointed!!!
By M. Garland
This is one of those movies that a lot of people that haven't seen it say, "That movie wasn't really that good, was it?" but those that have seen it, say, "Why wasn't this movie more popular?" Maybe it was bad timing, or as some others suggested, just not correctly billed to the public.

Last Action Hero is hard to describe. It's funny, it's witty, with lots of those one-liners that Arnold became so popular with, and I loved the way he constantly poked fun at his fictional character as well as his "real" self. Some of my favorite dialogue in the movie is when the kid is trying to convince "character Arnold (aka: Jack Slater)" that he's actually just a character in a movie. The kid starts asking about phone numbers and how can they possibly all start with 555- in a city with several million phone numbers, when Jack Slater exasperatedly says, "That's why we have Area Codes..." Priceless. The movie is full of fun stuff like that, and I highly recommend this movie to anyone who is even remotely a Schwarzenegger fan, or who just like campy, yet intelligent, movies. The parody within a parody, and movie within a movie actually worked well in this one.

I thought the movie had a lot of great character performances, and clever scripting, and I think this movie got a bum rap. It's really a great movie, I'm glad I bought the DVD. The transfer is a little sloppy in places on the one I bought, but since it's a "Special Anniversary Edition", I have a feeling that had something to do with it. There's only a fullscreen version on my DVD, no widescreen, and the camera pans are really noticeable in a few places.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A very underated Schwarzenegger film.
By A Customer
John McTiernan's "Last Action Hero" is always looked at as one of the big flops in modern day cinema. The truth is the film is a lot better than a lot of people are willing to admit. In Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" a desperate women falls in love with a character in a film she watches who just happens to jump out of the screen. Well it is basically the same sort of formula only a kid gets in on the action of the latest Schwarzenegger film, "Jack Slater 4" yet befriends the character and not the actor who thinks all of it is real and not a film. True, it is not as bittersweet as Allen's movie but I don't find that to be a flaw. It is a very fun movie and it was very enjoyable the whole way through. Arnold Schwarzenegger does a great parody of himself as Slater who spits out one liners during violent conflicts. I even found Austin O' Brien to be a fairly decent child actor in this film and that is a rare suprise in this sort of a film. The film is also backed by a great score of hard rock music from AC/DC, Alice in Chains, Megadeath and more. John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered heavy blows with this film. True, it was not either of their best work but I think the critics were way too cruel. Its should not be viewed as a failure but as an enjoyable action adventure that it is.

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Product Description

Taut and emotionally powerful, Michael Apted's compelling showdown courtroom drama is driven by characters as intriguing as its predicament. The only thing Jedediah Tucker Ward and his daughter have in common is law. Equally brilliant, equally driven, t

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3702 in DVD
• Brand: Fox
• Released on: 2005-02-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 110 minutes

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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker
In this high-concept legal thriller, directed by Michael Apted, Gene Hackman plays a flamboyant lawyer who specializes in civil-liberties and consumer-advocacy cases, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays his daughter, an ambitious associate in a slick corporate-law firm. The script-by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames, and Samantha Shad-contrives to pit the father and the daughter against each other in a negligence suit against an auto manufacturer. Sparks, both personal and professional, are meant to fly, but the Hollywood engineers who designed this piece of product have cut a few too many corners: the thriller plotting is predictable, the family drama is broad and sentimental, and the connections between them are facile. Yet Hackman and Mastrantonio somehow manage to impart lifelike rhythms to their scenes together: their skill keeps this rickety contraption from stalling completely. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Very Moving
By Hugo Dart
This is an extraordinary drama in which father and daughter (both lawyers) with big emotional issues have a face-off in the courtroom.
Aside from a very well-constructed plot and competent direction by Michael Apted, the performances delivered by the actors are quite impressive. The supporting cast is very good, especially Jan Rubes (Alexander Pavel).
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio shows great maturity in a challenging role - and the fact that she is stunningly beautiful does not hurt.
And what about that Gene Hackman? What a brilliant actor. Watching him feels like a real privilege. Don't you miss the chance of doing it.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Family Drama Set in a Courtroom
By William D. Shingleton
There are really two kinds of lawyer films out there; the kind that is about the trial and the kind that is about the lawyers; this film is about the lawyers and the family drama of a father and daughter pitted against each other in a class action lawsuit. The film is well constructed and acted, though there is the occasional corny dialoge in the father-daughter scenes that could have been written much stronger.
The father (played by Gene Hackman) is a crusading support-the-little-guy type, but he is not without his warts and particularly not without the consequences of his giant ego. Hackman is perfect in this role and gives his character the depth it deserves. Mary Elizabeth Masterantonio plays the daughter and is really the center of the film since it is her evolution more than Hackman's that drives the plot. She more than holds her own against a much more experienced actor and gives the film credibility.
There are a few witty remarks in the film but I can't say that the dialogue crackles; since this is not an action film, the dialogue is how the film moves along, so that's a shame. But the plot is enthralling and takes a few unexpected twists at the end; combined with the solid cast (this was shot so long ago that Fred Dalton Thompson was not yet a senator and Lawrence Fishbourne is listed as Larry) it makes the film engaging and certainly worth the low price of this DVD.
The DVD itself is disappointing and carries no special features to speak of (trailers for this film and other movies DO NOT count as special features, at least in my opinion). The only reason to get the DVD versus the tape is that it's easier to find and will hold up better over time.
The bottom line is that this is a solid, well acted film whose David versus Goliath, Inc theme rings even more true in the post-Enron universe than it did when the film first came out.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Thrilling Courtroom Drama
By Bill Windsor
Best courtroom drama movie I have ever seen. Performances of Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are superb as father and daughter attorneys on opposite sides of an automobile accident case. The story pits big-corporation corporate attorney (Mastrantonio) against small-time scrappy class-action attorney (Hackman). But the highlight is the intra-family dynamics between father, mother, and daughter, which are superbly developed as the tension of the lawsuit case unfolds. The screenwriting is excellent, handling characters from attorneys to family to scientists, plus powerful revelations in the final courtroom scene. You will say, "Wow" at the end.

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Jan Schlichtmann is a cynical, high-priced personal injury attorney who only takes big-money cases he can safely settle out of court. Though his latest case at first appears straightforward, Schlichtmann soon becomes entangled in an epic legal battle ... one where he's willing to put his career, reputation, and all that he owns on the line for the rights of his clients! Also featuring Robert Duvall, William H. Macy, and John Lithgow -- this gripping, widely acclaimed hit delivers edge-of-your-seat entertainment!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2951 in DVD
• Brand: BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 1999-07-13
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Dimensions: .26 pounds
• Running time: 115 minutes

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Jonathan Harr's nonfiction bestseller was a shot in the arm for those seeking more than last-minute heroics akin to a John Grisham thriller. Here was a labyrinthine case involving industrial pollution by two highly regarded corporations, contaminated drinking water, and the deaths of innocent children in New England, circa 1981. The case has hundreds of twists and takes our hero--a steady, respectable lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann--and turns his life into personal disaster. Instead of celebrating the law, the story is a maddening and rewarding look at the elusiveness of the courtroom case.

Steven Zaillian, who won an Oscar for adapting Schindler's List and directed Searching for Bobby Fischer, boils Harr's 502-page book into a complete, satisfactory film experience. Book readers will no doubt jeer the streamlining Zaillian had to perform to make the movie flow. Most changes can be quickly defused with the exception of the film's portrait of Schlichtmann. The lawyer has been turned into a movie star, an ultra-slick, cold-hearted gentleman who finds his purpose in working the case. Casting a stalwart John Travolta again diverges from the book, which right from the opening pages showed us a Schlichtmann with feet of clay. As Schlichtmann's partners (including William H. Macy and Tony Shalhoub) descend into the case, the unbridled sense of power and money is abandoned. This case is ultimately about survival.

Zaillian provides an excellent narrative for the sordid facts of personal injury suits, in which money is the only reward for lost or broken lives (deftly introduced in the film's opening scene). Zaillian also stays away from dwelling on the illness of the children involved, focusing on the gaunt faces of the parents who survive (Kathleen Quinlan, James Gandolfini) in controlled anguish. His evil characters--an industrial plant's owner (Dan Hedaya) and a corporate lawyer (another fine acting spin by director Sydney Pollack)--are so human it's terrifying. Zaillian's final ace in the hole is Oscar-nominee Robert Duvall. Perfectly cast as Travolta's opposition, Jerome Facher, Duvall steals scenes with the abbreviated dialogue; he turns a fancy settlement meeting into a farce with one line. Facher is not a callous, love-to-hate-him lawyer like James Mason in The Verdict. Facher represents the law at its brilliant foundation: to best represent one's client. With a taped-together briefcase and dry humor, Facher, not Schlichtmann, is the character who captures us by the film's end. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Yet another movie about the redemption of a lawyer. Swathed in double-breasted Italian suits, Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta), a flashy Boston ambulance chaser, gets caught up in a working-class town's battle with two large corporations that may have polluted their water and caused several deaths. Obsessed, Schlichtmann loses his professional judgment and sacrifices everything to the case. That the story is true (and based on an expertly written book by Jonathan Harr) doesn't make "A Civil Action" any more satisfying dramatically-there's a streak of obviousness in the moral melodrama that dampens one's interest. Robert Duvall gives a witty performance as a seemingly preoccupied and eccentric but actually devastatingly effective litigator; unfortunately, the big confrontation between Duvall and Travolta which the entire movie seems headed for never materializes. Written and directed by Steven Zaillian. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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38 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant but ultimately sad portrayal of an uncivil system
By Daniel J. Hamlow
Sometime in the late 1960's, a hideous act of pollution took place in Woburn, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston. Over the next fifteen years, twelve people died of leukemia. Eight of those were children. The firm of Jan Schlichtmann, Kevin Conway, James Gordon, and Bill Crowley take on the case on behalf of Anne Anderson, a woman who lost her child to cancer. For her, money isn't the point. All she wants to know is what happened, and for the responsible parties to come over and apologize to her and the other families. Thing is, corporations apologize with money, and if the corporations have deep pockets, it's a case worth taking, so money does indeed become the point in A Civil Action.
Schlichtmann uncovers the culprits, a chemical company, WR Grace and Beatrice Foods, who provide services for a tanning company owned by Riley. With that, he files a lawsuit, the legal equivalent to a declaration of war, and hires a geological team to provide scientific evidence should it come to trial.
Jan then does a couple things that leads to his downfall. One, he gets personally involved. In a news broadcast, he holds up snaps of the Woburn kids who have died. He shows empathy, which is a grave disservice to the legal profession because it clouds his judgment. He says it's like a doctor recoiling at the sight of blood. That leads to his demanding of WR Grace and Beatrice Foods a multi-million dollar settlement, including money for a research foundation, to cover expenses, and to provide for the families for thirty years, which the corporations refuse, which in turn takes the case to trial. He does this without consulting his partners, which doesn't bode well. James Gordon, the accountant, points out that they need to work on other cases to provide a cash flow. Schlichtmann has sunken a million into the Woburn case, and pretty soon, they teeter on the waterfalls of insolvency to the point of mortaging their homes. It's become a source of pride, which has undone many an attorney as opposed to idiot witnesses, lousy evidence, and the hanging judge put together, as Jerome Fasher tells his law class.
Fasher, the attorney for Beatrice, is a statesman-like man of experience, but has a detached air coupled with some eccentricities. Yet he is a clever man, and his observation on the justice system is true, at times sickening. When Schlichtmann tells him he's searching for the truth, he tells him, "You've been around long enough to know that a courtroom's not the place to look for the truth." And he accurately says that the case stopped being about children the moment Schlichtmann filed for action.
The movie is sprinkled with legal commentary from Schlichtmann, which lays out how callous, ugly, and illogical the justice system is. He begins by talking about which types of clients are worth more, i.e. are winning cases. Whites are worth more than blacks, men more than women, a long agonizing death over a quick one. A white male professional in his 40's, in his prime, is worth the most. A dead child is worth least of all. Well, Schlichtmann finds out that children are worth something after all, especially when he imagines an agonizing scene where the LaFierros were taking their son to the hospital and died en route.
While John Travolta's best known for Grease and Saturday Night Fever, A Civil Action proves he can handle serious drama and he turns in one of his best ever performances. However, the real Jan Schlichtmann came to Farmington. He's close to seven feet tall, and in terms of resemblance, could've been played by Richard Gere. As Anne Anderson, Kathleen Quinlan is the other great performer, playing a woman changed through her ordeal into someone who has a tired and sad visage. The scene where Al Love (James Gandolfini), a conscience-stricken tannery employer personally apologizes to her shows that maybe the only real meaningful apologies come from humans, not corporations.
Trials and lawsuits are examples of how corrupt and rotten the legal system and some lawyers are. Is it worth having a system where the first party to come to their senses (i.e. to cut their losses and call for a settlement) is the loser? A Civil Action also shows that despite the need for compassion, it's better to have a lawyer who thinks more with the head than the heart.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
An Honest Hollywood Adaptation, For Once!
By Robert J. Schneider
No, this film is not "based on a true story" or the cringe-inducing "inspired by a true story" (the latter which can mean anything, and usually does)--the fact is, this film IS a true story. It is the true story of how a materialistic personal injury lawyer pursues a noble yet unwieldly case, at the cost of all the materialistic benefits that he had spent his entire career in creating for himself.

Yes, this case really did exist. Yes, there really was (and still is) a lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann (as portrayed by Travolta), who really did pursue this case against two large corporations, Beatrice and W.R. Grace (both named in the movie), who really did illegally dump pollutants in a neighborhood somewhere in Massachusetts, and which really did cause the deaths of 12 children from leukemia. Yes, Mr. Schlichtmann really DID comment cynically when he was first presented with the case, "I really don't see the value in a bunch of dead babies." There really was a corporate defense attorney named Jerome Facher (as portrayed by Duvall) who played this case as if constantly hedging his bets at a Vegas casino poker table. And so on...you get the idea.

This film is brutally honest, names names, pulls no punches...and forgoes the typical, traditional Hollywood-style happy ending for one that is completely real, unfabricated, and ultimately satisfying in the realization that, it too, is real. That doesn't mean that it is emotionally unsatisfying. After all, after investing nearly two hours with this case, and these characters, about which we grow to care completely (especially because we know they're real), this film does provide the payoff in the end. I just won't tell you which one; you have to see this brilliant film in order to find out.

This film proves, for once and for all, that the truth really is stranger than fiction!

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Intelligent and Compelling Courtroom Drama
By snalen
Jan Schlichtmann (Travolta) is a Boston tort lawyer and something of an ambulance chaser who is initially reluctant to take on an industrial pollution case involving some children dead of leukaemia in rural New England. He changes his mind when he realizes the likely defendants are a couple of big companies with particularly deep pockets and smells the possibility of serious money. Over time, however his interest in the case becomes a moral obsession. The cynical becomes a crusader, refusing offers to settle as his company's finances spiral downwards towards bankruptcy.

If you like courtroom dramas, this is highly recommended. It's one of the best specimens of the genre to come out of America since `The Verdict'. It's interesting to compare it to `Erin Brockovich' released a couple of years later. EB is about how a heroic small timer takes on the big boys of corporate America and how her pluck and determination triumphs over all obstacles, something of a legal feelgood movie in other words. Which this, to its great credit, is not. Its central character, for starters, is far more amibivalently likeable: initially just out for a fast buck, moral seriousness has to creep up on him and take him by surprise (perhaps reminding writer/director Zaillian of Oskar Schindler whose story he scripted for Spielberg a few years earlier) and the story's development paints a significantly more ambivalent picture of what pluck and determination can accomplish. It's a highpoint of Travolta's acting career even if he is comprehensively upstaged by Robert Duvall, on brilliant form as his quietly cynical adversary, bigshot lawyer Jerome Facher who knows far better than to look for the truth in a courtroom...