Peter Landesman
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This occasionally useless – but more often drab – true-life story has got a notion that it’s playing in the same league as Michael Mann’s The Insider.
Much like The Insider, Michael Mann's jaundiced take on the tobacco industry, Landesman's film uses a real-life whistleblower to expose the evils of a multibillion-dollar institution.
Unfortunately, pre-release hopes that it would do for crusading forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu what Michael Mann’s “The Insider” did for big tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand are equally unfounded, as the film’s attempt to marry an earnest public-health expose with a corporate-malfeasance thriller and a sweet immigrant love story never comes together in a satisfying way.
It’s like if another whistle blower movie, “The Insider,” ended with Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand saying cigarettes aren’t that bad.
The same goes for The Insider , director Michael Mann’s great 1999 film about a tobacco-industry scientist turned anti-smoking whistleblower.
Concussion mostly sticks to formula; it’s a crusading whistleblower movie, not too far from (though slightly inferior to) The Insider, both an actor’s showcase and a vehicle for creating restrained goosebumps.
Even a movie like Concussion, which was accused of softening its story to protect the league, still used real teams, players, and game footage to emphasize how serious CTE is and how harshly the multi-billion dollar organization dismissed it.
I did not like it in “Concussion” (2015), and I don’t like it here…
Austin’s somber dad, Tommy (Brian Cox), isn’t exactly a Charles Addams type either, even if he is more wrapped up in the minutiae of what they do — not because he’s intimately interested, like Will Smith in “Concussion,” just very thorough.