A Dark Truth

A Dark Truth (2012)

An ambitious movie, intending more than it achieves. At stake is a critique of the corporate cornering of water rights in the Third World. This is a real problem, and deserves better than this by Hollywood, if a big movie is the way to go about it. (A far better attempt, and a far better movie, is "También la lluvia", or "Even the Rain," set in Bolivia and starring Gael García Bernal.)

The really great actor here is Forest Whitaker, who has a fairly small role as a South American rebel leader with a true conscience. The lead actor is the ever-struggling (if sincere) Andy Garcia, who is a retired South American CIA man with a quasi-political radio talk show to keep him and his troubled wife and child alive and very well.

You can smell the connection that has to be made here, between Whitaker's jungle world of righteous rebellion and Garcia's safely withdrawn world of buried political misdeeds. The third world (narratively) is the big water purification company itself, with a slightly evil corporate head and his slow-to-wake sister who finally realizes the corporation their father started is corrupt and murderous. This third leg of the triangle is complex, and a bit unconvincing with its too-easy array of killers and corporate spies and Ecuadorian accomplices all a cell phone call away.

I might make clear here the movie is not a dud but it's very troubled, both formally (editing and writing issues, mostly) and in terms of its purported content. That is, ultra-violent scenes of mass murder are used over and over again to press home how ruthless and bloody the corporate heads are, safe in their glassed offices in Toronto. (Yes, the corporation is Canadian, which I guess is a nice novelty since Canadians are so famously nice.) The actual problem of water use and clean water supplies for the villages shown is never explored. Instead we have people running and getting gunned down with weirdly nonsensical abandon. A lot.

The more you dwell on this the more you realize the movie makers are as evil as the corporate bosses they are portraying. They use this horrifying cinematic mayhem to draw you in and make you (in theory) sympathize with the rebels, and with the ordinary people who just want to live and have clean water. Well, of course! So then we get back to Garcia drawn to the jungle to single-handedly (with a revolver) save these rebels from the advancing army troops. (Yes, Andy Garcia plays the Matt Damon character here, which is really quite funny at times, and not on purpose.)

So eventually you see through all the seriousness to a pretty poorly cobbled together movie with lots of overlapping plots and some very very fast solutions to messy problems (like getting the wanted rebel leader out of Ecuador on an airplane without a blink). I'd skip this mess for lots of reasons. And go see "Even the Rain" with its much gentler flaws.

Talk about convoluted, slow, plodding, boring to tears, predictable, and a complete waste of time...then you're talking about "A dark truth". I was hoping there were some redeeming values or at else something I could say positive about this movie, and I'm hard pressed to come up with anything. I guess one good thing was it lasted less than 2 hours, does that count? I'm often amazed why decent actors and actresses take on roles in movies like this where the scripts are so weak, the story is boring, and the writing is pathetic junk, I guess it must be for the love of money because there could be no other reason for a decent actor to be in this one. This movie makes two in row for Eva Longoria, her retched performance in "The Baytown Outlaws" along with this masterful crafted acting job puts her in the truly "Desperate housewife" needs money category. I guess maybe she really can't act and is just another pretty face in Hollywood, judging by the roles she accepts "desperate" defines her career. One last thing for you to consider, the dialog in this movie is nothing less than ridiculous, and it's like the director told the actors to deliver their lines in slow motion. That may seem like a silly comment until you actually try to watch this film, I guarantee you'll know what I mean after trying to view this sleep induced attempt.

A Dark Truth (2012)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A real misfire of a film about a South American town where a large group of people become sick after sewage gets in their drinking water. To cover up the crime the military executes the survivors but a couple (Forest Whitaker, Eva Longoria) survive and soon an ex-CIA agent (Andy Garcia) is trying to rescue them and get their story out. A DARK TRUTH is a really bad movie in several ways but a lot of the blame has to go to writer-director Damian Lee who just doesn't come up with a very interesting story or a good way to tell it. There are so many problems with the story itself that you have to wonder why he elected to go with a fake story instead of getting something real. This is basically just a message picture where once again greed turns people into evil monsters over a natural resource. The problem is that the film just wants to preach its message without giving us a story or characters to really care about. The film bounces around from the jungles to the high-top people trying to cover up the crime and also gives us flashbacks to the CIA agent working as a radio host giving off various speeches. None of this comes together in any way, shape or form and in the end this movie just ends up dragging to the point where the viewer will be wanting to hit the stop button. It doesn't help that there are some pretty boring directorial choices and especially when it comes to the editing. Just check out the scenes between Garcia and his wife were the edits back and forth between them are so annoying that you just want to scream. I will say that the performances are better than average but then again we've got a group of professionals here. With that said, their work can't come close to saving this turkey.

I generally agree with other reviews of this film in terms of weak writing and lugubrious direction. I am rating it higher primarily because it actually has real actors in the cast, hence you can watch it without having a gag-reflex. Also, the cinematography was better than average in this genre.

While there was nothing original in the plot structure, the moral ambiguity expressed through several key characters was somewhat refreshing...though, not fully resolved.

Sadly, the fine actor, Andy Garcia, is not properly exploited in this film. He comes across less than fully dimensional. The director went to a gold mine and barely got silver.

In the end, not a waste of the viewer's time, but more an appetizer than an entrée.

This is the first I've seen of movies on the particular subject of what major international corporations such as Bectel are doing to underdeveloped countries as regards their water. Well done treatment, great cast, excellent acting. No hamming or sensationalism, no gratuitous violence (not that there isn't enough to tell the story). Perhaps other reviewers don't consider water as exciting as blood diamonds or oil or uranium. Perhaps it's not. But it's certainly more important. This fictional presentation of the issue is a good start toward expanding popular awareness of one of the biggest problems facing us in this new century.

Not water shortages, critical though they are. Rather, soulless, nationless corporate greed. Seven out of ten.