Reviews

I'm not a movie critic but I did practice law for 41 years. The courtroom scenes in this movie exceed the outermost boundaries of stupidity. This is sloppy, incompetent and irresponsible writing. A piece of trash. It's impossible to point a finger at the person responsible with two screenwriters fiddling with a novel. Disgusting.

For a farce comedy this movie doesn't have many laughs. It has elves, orcs and references to the "Dark Lord" but no story. Didn't watch all of it. I had the feeling the actors were going to suddenly face the camera and, in a chorus, say, "we're only kidding."

Whatever vices or virtues this movie has, it is a paean of really vicious hate propaganda against free market economics. The corporation in the story is blamed for an atrocious massacre which is actually committed by the Ecuadorian army, for a typhus outbreak and for the usual, general perversity and greediness that corporations are characterized with in this type of hate propaganda.

I can only imagine what an Ecuadorian would think of the way his country is portrayed in this garbage can full of lies disguised as fiction.

I would avoid watching this kind of trash if I could see it coming. Why don't movie reviews routinely include a commentary on the propaganda content of movies like this?

This movie is so badly photographed my wife and I could not sit through the first half hour. The bad photography was not an accident. The story is (as the blurb on the box says) taken from a video tape made by a TV news photographer on the scene of the events in the movie. Accordingly it is seen through the lens of a hand held portable camera. But the shaking and jerking is so ludicrously overdone as to make watching the movie an exercise in being irritated. A real world TV photographer who couldn't shoot steadier pictures than those in this movie would have to find another job. The jumping and jerking around of the screen image is apparently intended to build tension as you try to perceive what's going on. But it's extremely and obnoxiously overdone. This is a cheap way to shoot a movie while passing off the low photographic quality as part of the story. In real movies steady and smooth photography is a ground rule requirement.

I don't know how it comes out; we couldn't stand to watch it.