DVD Review: The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener is a superbly acted and visually beautiful movie. Then why did it leave me bored? Because this is yet another attempt at Hollywood trying to be "serious". Why is it, that whenever a big budget movie has a serious message of some kind, it is hyped as being "thought provoking" or "deep and meaningful"? The part that often goes overlooked with movies like this is, what was the message, and was it even a good one?
Apparently, the message of The Constant Gardener is that corporations are evil, and care about nothing other than money. Wow, this is a new idea. Hollywood usually portrays big, faceless corporations as beacons of humanity and charity. How odd. No matter, this movie goes against the grain and does it's own thing (if you do not understand the fine art of sarcasm, please close your browser window at this time). It shows us how sad the situation in certain African countries is, and how there wouldn't be any problems if the big faceless corporations would stop being all corporationy and corporatizing everything (huh?).
Where the movie really fails is that this is as far as it goes in explaining everything. We are supposed to believe that all of the problems in Africa would magically go away if major drug companies just cared about people. No matter that millions of lives have been saved by US and British based companies due to humanitarian efforts, it's not enough because it was all for the money.
It's too bad, because visually there are some very powerful images in the movie. Some of the sites put into perspective how good we really have it here. And it is, as I said, very well acted. Too bad the big corporations ruined everything. Ruiners. (And they made me write the word "corporation" way too many times.)