Critic Reviews

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.

Addiction Incorporated delivers a hard kick in the butts to the tobacco industry.

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

It's an effective film, livened with animated rats, never boring.

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

While it's satisfying to see fat cats tamed by science and an enraged public, the movie misses the opportunity to sustain the pressure.

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.

Producer Charles Evans Jr.'s directorial debut finds an engrossing suspense angle in the involvement of Victor DeNoble, an idealistic scientist-turned-whistleblower whose suppressed corporate research became the bombshell catalyst in that struggle.

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

The interviewees are good storytellers--particularly the eccentric research scientists who tested the effects of nicotine on rats in the early 80s--and the editing keeps their stories moving at a lively pace.