Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I really wanted Body Brokers to be better. The predatory drug addiction treatment industry is a subject ripe for examination, to be sure, and there is no doubt it could make for a very compelling film. Body Brokers just falls short of the mark.

Writer-director John Swab is transparently influenced by films like The Big Short, tackling a complex topic with snappy editing and voice-over narration by a self-consciously cool guy—in this case Vin (Frank Grillo, officially the hottest guy I have ever seen over the age of 55), the guy who basically runs the broad swindle at play here. He’s just one of many said guys, really: there are many millions to be made in this industry, as the film notes in Southern California alone (you can extrapolate to the entire country at will). Swab can’t seem to decide, however, which tone he wants to strike: the clever editing with fun graphics conveying numbers and data, or simply telling a straightforward story. He moves back and forth between the two, and under his direction, the latter actually works better.

Thus, Body Brokers would have worked better without all that snappy stuff, all of it clearly imitating other movies that did it better. There is an economy to the use of voice-over narration as well, but it comes at the expense of story depth.

The one strong suit is the performances, without which I might have gotten genuinely bored. But Jack Kilmer—Val Kilmer’s son, come to find out; no wonder there was something vaguely familiar about his face—not only proves up to the task, but gives a performance that is better than the mediocre script demands. The same could be said of Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire, Lovecraft Country), who plays the seasoned “broker” named Wood, who finds Utah (Kilmer) in his home state of Ohio and somehow convinces him to catch a plane with him back to California for treatment.

Utah’s girlfriend, Opal (Alice Englert)—John Swab seems to have a penchant for distinctive names: Wood, Utah, Opal—at this point becomes surprisingly reasonable when she expresses distrust at Utah’s willingness to fly all the way out to the west coast with a stranger. Why would anyone do that? The desperation of an addict, maybe. Still, even for a movie that claims to be “based on true events,” I wonder how plausible that particular scenario is compared to, say, finding the plenty of addicts already in California. Does this guy really need to fly around the country to find hopeless junkies?

They certainly find them across the country, from call centers reaching out to targeted states with higher rates of addiction. But the scene in which this is depicted specifies how they are answering calls, from people where their late night commercials air in said targeted states. A bit too much of Body Brokers is contrived out of plot convenience.

To its credit, Body Brokers is still notably informative. I feel like I learned a lot, and the end title card noting that 15 people died of an overdose while I was watching this movie hit pretty hard. I love that the text then adds that people have been maintaining sobriety for years with the help of 12-step programs, and those don’t cost a cent. The people running these programs are not only using drug treatment centers so they can get funding from people’s insurance coverage (this movie cites the Affordable Health Care Act as a big part of this), they even literally pay addicts to keep coming back and filling their beds. This is money they often take and immediately use for drugs.

Over the course of the film, Utah goes through the program himself, miraculously becomes one of the very few for whom sobriety sticks, and when he learns of the corrupt nature of the program he just went through, he decides he wants a piece of that pie. Wood is his mentor throughout. I think Body Brokers may have worked better had there been any uncorruptable characters, but Wood’s attitude from the start is that these people will all be addicts no matter what happens so they might as well profit from it, and Utah’s entire arc is about how a young man who seems to have a conscience can be systematically turned by the presentation of wealth as a replacement for drug addiction. Some people who otherwise like this film might feel dissatisfied by its downbeat ending, but how it ends is actually one of its stronger points—as it’s making a valid point. It’s just making one in a way that doesn’t make for all that great a movie watching experience.

*Did I mention Wood is also randomly an Angelino with a cowboy aesthetic?*

Overall: B-