Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

Through "Bhopal," the filmmaker argues that the promise of jobs and prosperity all too often trumps environmental and safety concerns, and it leads government to ignore corporate wrongdoing.

Arriving three decades after the fact, this docudrama doesn't quite do justice to its important subject.

While Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, an earnest account of the world’s worst industrial accident, certainly has its heart in the right place, it’s not good that the closing titles about the cold, brutal facts of the aftermath stir more outrage than the preceding docudrama.

Some of the portrayals are over-the-top in their villainy, and the dialogue, acting and music all tend to be melodramatic. But all of the overt heartstring-pulling doesn’t add much. Given the awful calamity, the truth would have been enough to amp up the emotions.

The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.

It's an unsolved mystery in Hollywood why so many based-on-true-life polemical films end up so unremarkable.

This is crudely mounted, earnest advocacy, getting its points across at any cost.