Addiction Incorporated

Straight-shooting, hard-hitting and fuming with contempt for the tobacco industry, Addiction Incorporated would be almost too exhausting to watch were it not for the folksy charm of its star witness.

Once it finds its footing in old-fashioned journalism, the film packs a wallop.

The film's subject, a whistle-blowing research scientist who played a key role in the fight to regulate tobacco, deserves to be celebrated.

DeNoble aside, Addiction Incorporated finds most of its heroes in Congress, the White House and federal agencies.

With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.

The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.

So long as we're watching DeNoble recounting the details of his laboratory experiments, Addiction Incorporated remains sufficiently gripping; when Evans is reduced to observing his saintly subject educating high-school students about the dangers of nicotine addiction, it's considerably less so.