Die dunkle Wahrheit

This is one of the best corporate scandal movies ever made. This time it involves a Canadian company rather than a standard typical stereotype American one.

Worldwide travelers like me will appreciate the international realistic business environment exposure that includes Canada, South Africa and Ecuador. Plot twists and turns do not disappoint. Scenes look very realistic and portray how real life business and living conditions exist in these parts of the world.

The performances are outstanding. Andy Garcia gives perhaps his best acting performance yet in his career. Forest Whitaker is equally as impressive shining again as an actor playing another convincing international role character.

Please do yourself a favor and watch this movie. It entertains and delivers so it should not be missed.

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.

"When you can't affect change from within, I mean positive change, you have an obligation if you're at all conscious to get out and try other things." Jack Begosian (Garcia) is a former CIA operative who is now a talk show host talking about important issues. Bruce Swinton (Coates) is the head of a large corporation who has just found out about a huge problem with his company and a local African community. When his sister wants him to tell the truth he fights her and she hires Jack to go in and expose what is going on in the country. This is a very important movie that should be seen by more people then will actually see it. Very engrossing and informative and worth seeing. The only real problem I have is that it plays almost more like a Dateline or 60 Minutes type story then a movie. I'm not saying that that is a bad thing but that's what I was reminded of. The acting is great and I recommend this but be ready for this type of movie. Overall, a very important movie that may have the possibility to change things. I give it a B+.

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.