Overblown,overdone pretentiousness

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 1999)

Here's what we learn in about two and a half hours:
Big Tobacco companies are bad, Lowell Bergman is good.
Mike Wallace is a bumbling, eccentric fool, who finally sees the light after having it flashed in front of his face about a dozen times.
A tobacco company whistle blower, Jeffrey Wigand got royally screwed for breaking his confidentiality agreement and speaking out on the negative health impacts of smoking.
Predictably, his wife will abandon him when times get tough. ...and, we're all at the mercy of big corporations, which are all in bed with each other anyway.
If you're thinking that this story could have been compressed into about half the time (or less!), it was, when it originally aired in the form of a sixty minutes episode. Of course, that episode didn't have the stylish directing talents of Michael Mann, a suave Al Pacino strolling on a dimly lit beach screaching "I fought for you and I STILL fight for you...", and other tantalizing little moments which Mann attempts to inject at every twist and turn in order to keep things moving. Indeed, Mann is a director who knows how to stretch a film out for 2+ hours and not make the viewer look at his watch.
I guess I could have just done with less cloak and dagger stuff and more documentary style details, like one might find on a PBS Frontline episode. As a matter of fact, that's precisely where Lowell Bergman ended up after leaving CBS over this fiasco.
For all Mann's stylish directing talents (who doesn't like those city skyline shots that Mann seems to use so much) and Pacino's shouting and posturing, this film just ends up being an slickly produced, over dramatized hollywood version of events that by now are well known to most.