“Puncture” (2011), directed by Paul and Adam Kassem with
story by Paul Danziger, is a bit like a John Grisham legal thriller (like “Rainman”)
with evil insurance and pharmaceutical companies, set in the late 1990s.
Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) and Paul (played by Mark Kassem)
are the underdog Houston lawyers, and Mike has a character weakness – drug addiction,
which puts him in the hospital after a vomiting spell in the film’s middle section. Are such fallibilities of rooting-interest
protagonists necessary? This is appears
to be based on a true story (Weiss’s dates are given as 1967-1999).
The lawyers stumble upon a plaintiff Vicky (Vanessa Shaw)
with HIV from a hospital needlestick. The course of the litigation shows that
the corporate defendants conspired to keep safer syringes out of the market to
boost profits. The script at one point
seems to blame the companies for the entire HIV epidemic explosion in the
1980s, as well as the subsequent outbreak of Hepatitis C.
The screenplay has a lot of exposition, with characters
explaining the sins of the companies rather than engaging in natural
dialogue. Maybe this argues that the
film should have been a documentary.
The
film is a bit low-keyed for the seriousness of the subject matter.
The most relevant website now seems to be “Safe Needle”.
Wikipedia attribution link for picture of downtown Houston
by Henry Wan, under Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 license.
I visited the city many times while
living in Dallas in the 1980s.
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