A Dark Truth (2012)

When Any Garcia, Forest Whitaker, and Eva Longoria lend their names to a movie, you normally expect greatness. I don't have words for how completely awful this movie is. Yes, it has a point, but it takes wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too long to get there. It's as if it was written by a 5 year old child, and acted out by his kindergarten friends. Being from Toronto Canada, I was hoping for a lot more out of a Canadian movie, but this just further stereotypes that we can't make a decent movie in Canada. It literally took me 3 tries to make it through this atrocity. I'd be embarrassed to put my name to this. What a joke. For the love of god people, don't waste your time. Go watch "Hansel and Gretel Get Baked" instead. At least it has character.

Perhaps people should read all the credits at the end of the movie to realize that the film was based on real events, and that people who were actually involved in the events were interviewed. The actors were well chosen and gave good performances. Some characters appear in the story without clarifying who they really are, so it creates a bit of a maze of people, not all really essential for the story. But apart from that the plot flows well. Some people, who have written reviews here, did not think that the story is original enough. What worried me about the story is the Canadian connection. Could it be based on what a Canadian Company was doing? If so, everybody in Canada should see this movie.This is the third time I see Andy Garcia, one of my favourite actors, in a film in which he was involved in the production. The other two were about the artist Modigliani "Modigliani 2004", and the second about the life of Arturo Sandoval "For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story" (2000). - It seems the actor wishes to participate in movies that have a meaning for him.

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.

The casting of the movie is incredible. Which is always the case when a message is being delivered. It's not too much on the nose here or at least it is incorporated into the story quite good. The actors you know do what they can. Eva Longoria might have the least to do (especially considering her name/weight). It's nice seeing some old familiar faces in a movie, where they try to build character.There is quite a bit of cliché in this, but you wouldn't/couldn't expect otherwise. Kevin Durand has a great little role in it and he makes his decision, no matter how small or big they are, actually work. Apart from that it's mostly the Andy Garcia show, with some added drama by Kara Unger and Forrest Whitacker. A nice little drama, with a lot of action in it.