Pun Salad

The second movie in our Sunday night double-feature (which, in blog logic, puts it above the first movie). It's OK, but not quite as funny as it thinks it is.

Aaron Eckhart is a good-looking, fast-thinking, likeable tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor. I was about to say "sleazeball", but that's not exactly true; Nick's doing nothing underhanded. He's just putting the industry's best possible arguments forward.

And (as it develops) the movie is not really about anything much, other than Nick interacting with a bunch of other people who are just trying to pay their mortgages. (The only apparent exception: a gang of extremist anti-tobacconists who are portrayed unsympathetically.)

Nobody actually smokes in the movie. An interesting choice, although it makes a scene late in the movie when Nick is told that he must give up smoking kind of peculiar; the viewer didn't know that he smoked in the first place.