Prescription Thugs

Despite his casual aura, the filmmaker is eloquent and thoughtful.

Even before a "do as I say, not as I do" twist costs it all credibility, "Prescription Thugs" is a not very good documentary about a very important subject.

Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial, it's a hot-button work whose easily digested nonfiction methods will appeal to mainstream documentary audiences, even if they also leave viewers hungry for greater substance.

It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.

An accessible look at an important topic: the medicine that ails us.

If you want to see a documentary about the director's life and how drugs affected him personally, then go see this film. If you're looking for something about what society can do to combat a problem that has turned into an epidemic, look the other way.

You'll be hooked from the get-go. But like that elusive high, you're left wanting more.

Bell takes it personally as well as publicly with the tragic death of his own brother. And what exactly is going down with the deadly prescription drug epidemic, and pharmaceutical corporations in league with doctors and drugstores raking in billions.

Immensely relatable and genuine as the face of the film, [Chris] Bell sheds tremendous light on America's dependence on prescription medication.

An indictment of prescription drug overuse is limited by the relative absence of graphics and humor.

It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.