Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 3.0
TOBACCO AVENUE
One of those films that I always meant to watch and only now, years after the fact, I get around to doing so, and I am a little disappointed. Docudrama about top tobacco corporate vice president who aligns with TV's "60 Minutes" to expose tobacco company standards is too narrow-minded in scope to encompass all the havoc the tobacco empire exposes on the world, relying on the sympathetic plight and near ruin of the family man executive whose behavior borders on paranoia and insecurity. Al Pacino as a "60 Minutes" producer and Russell Crowe as the reluctant crusader executive both seem overdrawn as characters, Pacino in his familiar nervous edgy urban guy persona and Crowe as the weakling confused executive both grow tiresome after a while. Still, the movie moves along briskly and a surreal sequence where a hotel wall becomes an imagined memory invokes the sometimes hopelessness of tobacco addiction. But why does the film feel the need to mercilessly pick on "60 Minutes"'s Mike Wallace? I seem to be missing the inside word here.