THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

By Cole Smithey

Writer/director Jason Reitman tries to step outside of his father Ivan Reitman’s (“Ghostbusters”) footsteps with a soft peddled send up of Big Tobacco based on Christopher Buckley’s novel.

Alternately infuriating and charming Aaron Eckhart does the contemptible honors as Washington tobacco lobbyist and spin-doctor Nick Naylor.

When Nick isn’t teaching his son the ins and outs of winning debates, or comparing death statistics over lunch with fellow “Merchants of Death” lobbyists, Nick is busy battling against an anti-smoking campaign to put a skull-and-crossbones on every cigarette pack.

Snappy pacing and carefully sculpted set pieces don’t disguise the satire’s lack of teeth. Reitman’s inability to pay off on any of the film’s skeletal sub-plots leaves Aaron Eckhart holding the narrative bag even if the capable actor carries the movie on his brawny shoulders like an obsolete Atlas.

Nick Naylor is in love with himself. Jason Reitman waters down the narcissistic Naylor of Buckley’s novel with a pasted-on loving paternal aspect that vaguely mitigates the damage Nick reaps on society, and liberal political opponents like Vermont Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy).

Naylor is a morally rudderless guy with a voracious capacity for vaporizing enemies with ambiguous logic fuelled by greed. He would be a great spokesperson for Scientology because he runs on a self-recharging battery of adrenaline released by greasing his way through confrontation with a smile. In short, Nick Naylor is a much smarter version of George Bush whose inexcusable smirk and faulty linguistics infect every subject he ever addressed.

Nick gets a public smack down after Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes), the Washington Post journalist he’s been screwing, writes a tell-all expose about Nick’s dirty secrets. The article sends a brief shudder through Nick’s career sails but doesn’t come close to delivering the kind of public roasting that the reprehensible character deserves.

Jason Reitman makes a compound mistake by viewing Nick Naylor as a man of admirable exploits rather than as an anti-hero inextricably bound to the film’s primary antagonist, the tobacco corporations. In a world where monolithic corporations are spreading global warming like an exponential function, “Thank You For Smoking” is too squishy in the middle to be of much value: entertainment or otherwise. It doesn’t meet the demands of the genre because it doesn’t choose sides.

In Jason Reitman’s shameless overture to Hollywood, he has accomplished giving them exactly what they want, a seemingly lefty movie with no cojones. With friends like these, the left needs no enemies.

Rated R. 92 mins.