scar-winner Matt Damon delivers another strong performance in an interesting, but predictable, courtroom drama.

Rising star Damon, who scooped an Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, plays a rookie solicitor in the latest adaptation of a John Grisham novel.

Grisham is the best-selling author with a long list of film smashes, such as A Time To Kill, The Firm and The Client. All were about lawyers.

The Rainmaker is the latest off the production line.

And, although it is generally pretty good and has an excellent all-star cast, it may leave you with a definite sense of deja vu.

Damon stars as Rudy Baylor, an idealistic, but penniless, solicitor working on his first trial.

He teams up with dodgy 'ambulance chaser' Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), a trainee lawyer who has repeatedly failed his bar exam.

They fight for justice, and pots of money, as they take on a giant insurance company on behalf of a dying leukaemia victim and his family. The insurers refuse to honour the sick man's policy, thereby denying him a bone marrow transplant.

The inexperienced duo are pitted against a top legal team, led by Leo F Drummond (Jon Voight).

Here's where the film fell down for me. Voight at first seems brilliant and very plausible as the smoothie monster, epitomising all the very worst in lawyers who sell their souls.

But he is so transparently slimy that I do not believe any jury in the world would ever back him in any case - thereby making a nonsense of his hotshot reputation.

He was on such a hiding to nothing against fresh-faced, honourable Damon that I began to feel a bit sorry for him.

Meanwhile, Danny Glover, star of Lethal Weapon, plays the judge and Micky Rourke weighs in with an impressive cameo as Damon's crooked boss 'Bruiser' Stone.

In between, the love interest is supplied, somewhat bizarrely, by Claire Danes, who plays a battered wife.

The trial scenes are interrupted by an odd sub-plot which involves a fight between Damon and her homicidal husband.

To add to the star names, the film is directed by Francis Ford Coppola, of Godfather fame.

The Rainmaker does turn out to be absorbing, even if the simplicity and predictability are off-putting.

It's not a classic of its genre, but John Grisham fans will get their usual good-value-for-money.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.