The battle over water rights has long been a source for cinematic storylines, from John Wayne westerns like Angel and the Badman to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Like Polanski’s classic, writer/director Damian Lee’s latest thriller, A Dark Truth, is also inspired by actual conflicts—with Lee moving beyond California’s Owens Valley to a more global scale, spotlighting underhanded corporate dealings in South America and Africa. Unfortunately, any similarities end there.
In his research, Lee learned of South American water wars that pitted big business and governments against local communities. Purportedly, farmers couldn’t even collect rainwater because all water belonged to conglomerates. Soldiers were sent in to protect the government interests (aka profits) with sometimes violent outcomes. It’s a fascinating issue, but A Dark Truth’s preachiness ultimately prevents it from being a successful indictment of politics or corporations.
Andy Garcia plays Jack Begosian, a former CIA operative with a less-than-admirable past in Central and South America. He’s been trying to purge his past sins by hosting a political talk radio show in Toronto. Snippets from Begosian’s talk shows serve as voiceovers throughout the film, as if the onscreen moralizing wasn’t enough. (The show’s radio callers are also distracting because most of them are too calm, reasonable and articulate for any political talk show.)
Begosian gets an offer at redemption when socialite Morgan Swinton (Deborah Kara Unger)—a major shareholder in her family’s water company—gets an ugly taste of the truth that jars her out of a substance-addled existence. She asks Begosian to investigate Clearbec, run by her brother, Bruce (Sons of Anarchy’s Kim Coates), finding what role the company played in an Ecuadorian village’s typhus outbreak and the killing of villagers who tried to escape.