NOBODY ROOTS FOR GOLIATH

Especially not when Goliath is Big Tobacco and David is blind, wasted Rich Zepf, 44, a four-pack-a-day man whose only goal before he trades his wheelchair and iron lung for a coffin is to sue T.S. Armstead, the company that made the cigarettes he couldn't give up. California attorney Bomber Hanson (The Mountain Massacres, 1995) sends his son Tod out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to check out the Zepfs; Tod falls hard for Rich and his 12 daughters, and even harder for Shauna McKinley, the redheaded local lawyer he's hired to do research; and the battle is joined. Bomber bids Tod find a chink in Armstead's armor; Tod digs up Donald Cantwell Powell, vice president in charge of production, a basket case since his first wife died of lung cancer. Somebody (surely not Shauna?) tips Armstead off about Powell's decision to bolt the company for Bomber and the Zepfs; Powell gets arrested for embezzlement the day before he's to fly up from North Carolina and testify. How will it all turn out? Let's just say that Champion's disarmingly light touch guarantees a pipe dream of an ending considerably less likely than either recent real- life litigation or the weight of the evidence in this highly fictional case would warrant. Philip Morris, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.