Steven Soderbergh’s true story of a paralegal who takes on corporate villains seems a little old-fashioned 25 years on

Re-released 25 years on, this is the true story of David-and-Goliath underdog heroism that was repurposed for the movies by screenwriter Susannah Grant and director Steven Soderbergh. Brockovich is the gutsy working-class woman, played by the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts, who gets a job as a paralegal and senses that local people are getting exploited – so without any professional training becomes the American Boudicca of class-action lawsuits, leading the charge against a Californian utility company that is poisoning the groundwater and causing hundreds of families to get sick. Her affectionate, exasperated boss Ed Masry is played with vigour by Albert Finney; Aaron Eckhart is her on-off boyfriend George, and Brockovich herself has a cameo as a waitress.

Revisited now, Erin Brockovich looks like an old-fashioned Hollywood A-list vehicle. It is essentially a feelgood, earnest story with some quaintly fabricated social-realist details and a serious but carefully controlled un-depressing tone. Roberts sails through all this with her own unmistakable charm and athletic ease, effectively playing her Pretty Woman persona a decade or so on, as Erin cheerfully uses her cleavage to get her way. Masry asks how she miraculously persuaded a male librarian to let her have sensitive documents; Erin replies: “They’re called boobs, Ed!” Roberts is always watchable, although the megawatt glare of Julia Roberts’s movie-star glamour means that you’re never exactly going to mistake this “Erin Brockovich” for an ordinary mortal.