R, 1 hr. 39 min.
Directed By: Adam Kassen, Mark
Kassen. Release Date: Sep 23, 2011.
DVD Release Date: Jan 3, 2012.
It’s not often a movie makes me think, and this
week, I’ve seen two movies that got the old brainicle churning. Yesterday, Midnight in Paris had me thinking of my own time in the City of
Lights, and today I was thinking about the dangers faced by our health care
workers while they’re saving our lives.
If the “facts” provided unsubtly during the course of the movie, there
are more than one million needle stick accidents in American hospitals every
year. One million chances for blood borne
diseases to spread to people who are, well, fighting the good fight.
I also was forced to wonder how true was the tale
wherein a major American health care provider decided in favor of profits over
life. It’s not that I give most
companies more credit than that, and I know there are a lot of unfair things
going on in American business, but I have a hard time believing that not only
were businesses risking human lives, but that American politicians were
supporting them. I certainly have a
problem believing that a company hired people to kill a lawyer opposing them,
as is suggested in the movie. If there
were truth in that, we’d have a hell of a lot less lawyers. While the movie claims to be based on a true
story, I can’t believe I’d never heard anything about this tale. It’s too horrible and there should have been
too large a media backlash for me to have missed it.
This wasn’t a great movie. It was a great story, told by a decent cast,
but I think it wasn’t something I was really expecting from Chris Evans, who
seems to have divided his time fairly equally between teen comedies and action
flicks. It’s also a role that we’ve him
do before, the junkie. This was much
better than London, the last movie
where we basically watched Evans do coke for ninety minutes, but only because of the positive message that
the movie delivers. It’s a role that he
does fairly well, although I would think that a junkie that far along might not
look quite so much like he was spending six hours a day in the gym. I even liked the movie, but it’s one that I
probably won’t recommend to people.
There’s a darkness here that I found unsettling. It caused some internal discussion, that much
is true, and I wish now that I’d had someone to watch this with me when I
popped it in to my DVD player, because the conversation afterward would have been
very interesting.
This gets an A for that internal debate, but a C for
pretty much everything else. If you’re
interested in health care safety, you may want to check this out… or, I guess
you might be interested in how business can mess with the quality of life.
