The Pelican Brief is a legal/spy thriller starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Stanley Tucci, Sam Shepard, John Heard, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Culp, and bunch of "oh, hey, it's John Lithgow!" type moments. It's based on a book by John Grisham, but the words "legal thriller" may have made that obvious.
Two Supreme Court justices (Hume Cronyn and Ralph Cosham) are assassinated by Agent 47 a mysterious figure later identified to be a "terrorist," but he's clearly a professional hitman. In New Orleans, a young law student named Darby (Roberts) gets a fire under her butt and researches the justices, trying to figure out why those two - obviously it must be about a point on which they agree, but they weren't politically aligned in general. She writes the titular brief, gives it to her professor/lover Thomas (Shepard), and he's promptly blown up in a car bomb meant for her. She goes on the run while her brief circulates in the intelligence community, getting multiple people killed, until she finally goes to a reporter (Washington) who is clearly either moonlighting as a superhero or about to be (his name is Gray Grantham, for god's sake) and together they fight crime! Er, crack the case!
The truth behind the brief, which we don't learn until more than halfway through the movie, is that a shadow billionaire (remember when billionaires were shadowy?) knows that a court case is likely to wind up in front of SCOTUS in a few years, and if he wins, he stands to make a billion dollars destroying Louisiana wetlands. Kill a couple of justices now, and the president now (Culp) is likely to appoint replacements who are going to be favorable to him (parties are never mentioned, but the president is obviously conservative if he'd appoint justices who would approve that kind of environmental destruction). Grantham and Darby eventually get the story out in the open, the president's slimy chief of staff (Goldwyn) who's been manipulating things resigns, there are actual political consequences, and Darby leaves the country.
I didn't love this movie. There's the basic stuff: it's too long, it takes far too long for us to learn what's in the mysterious brief (especially since it's not like the issues at hand are particularly complex or sexy), and honestly there's no one to really root for except maybe Grantham. Darby is our POV character, and Julia Roberts is doing her best (and she really is a good actress), but it's just not that interesting of a character or a role. It's paced too slowly to be a thriller, but calling it a "legal" anything is a stretch, because it's not like the law or courtrooms or anything really plays in. It's a MacGuffin chase, the MacGuffin in question being Julia Roberts and/or the brief.
But really, the reason I didn't enjoy this movie more is the same reason I have a hard time watching a lot of movies depicting "the president/lawmakers do Bad Things to cover up crimes" - the crimes they cover up are always so damn quaint. Like, in this movie, the shadowy billionaire donated $4 million to the president's campaign (just shy of $9 million in 2025 dollars) and now he's trying to influence who's on SCOTUS, but the only reason that matters at all is because he killed a couple of justices. Truth is, as we know, you can just bribe them with an RV or pay them off to retire, and then wipe out the incoming one's debt . Or, hell, throw money at a campaign until you get an idiot elected and then do whatever you want. The point is, like Dave or Wag the Dog or My Fellow Americans or The American President (probably, it's been a while for that last one), the movie hinges on the audience believing that those in power would care if the truth comes out, or that they would face consequences for their actions if it did. And in reality, we know different.
Anyway, that's bleak, but here we are the day after the president sat stroking himself to a big boom-boom parade in his honor, with lawmakers getting shot to the death by "fake" policemen while other face policeman snatch people off the street, and "oh no someone gave the president money and that might look bad" tastes a little sour, that's all.
My Grade: C
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Real Steel
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