Well made but where is the surprise?!

Rating: 7/10 (10 March 2014)

"The Insider" details the back story about a segment that "60 Minutes" aired back in the early 1990s. A fired vice president of the Brown and Williamson tobacco company talked with CBS--even though he was forbidden by a confidentiality agreement to talk about the company to anyone. His conscience was bothered by some of the unscrupulous and dangerous things the cigarette industry was covertly doing that made cigarettes even more dangerous. The film stars several Hollywood heavyweights--Al Pacino (the head of "60 Minutes, Russell Crowe (the whistle-blower) and Christopher Plummer (as Mike Wallace) and is a rather straight forward version of the story.
I agree with most of the reviews--"The Insider" is a very well-crafted film. However, it's also a case where the story, no matter how well made, is seriously flawed--at least to me. The theme of the film is how evil the tobacco companies are and how they knew that they were killing folks with their product. And, how this industry did its best to stop this story from being released by "60 Minutes". This is about as surprising as learning that pirates love booty, Nazis are evil or crack addicts love crack. Where is the story and where is the surprise?! Of course tobacco companies have been minimizing and denying that tobacco kills...DUH!!! They sell a product that kills people and they've been making it seem fun and glamorous for as long as they've been selling the product!! To me it's a no-brainer and frankly not that interesting. Plus, anyone who does choose to smoke is amazingly stupid--as we've known that cigarettes kill for many decades. So, while I respect the film for its quality, the story did nothing for me.