“You know that guy who could get any girl he wanted?” asks Aaron Eckhart’s endearingly cocksure tobacco lobbyist. “I’m him on crack.”
He’s not lying. Effortlessly defending Big Tobacco, in Jason Reitman’s gleeful satire, Eckhart reprises his smiling villain from In The Company Of Men with added charm. With the industry facing heavy losses, the self-styled face of cigarettes goes on the offensive, taking his ‘moral flexibility’ around chat shows and to Hollywood, where he hopes to convince super-agent Rob Lowe to put smoking back on the big screen.
Will his cute son (Bright), a snooping girl reporter (Holmes) and a kidnapping threat prise him away from his drinking buddies in the ‘Merchants Of Death’ (Maria Bello and David Koechner, representing alcohol and firearms respectively) gang?
Thankfully, the answer is no. Oddly, the film doesn’t feature a single lit cigarette, arguably undermining the director’s pro-choice agenda. But if we aren’t quite convinced where Reitman’s targets lie, we can know this for sure – the devil really does have the best material.