Michael Moore's overview of the American economy is, needless to say, not a love story. "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil." In other words, Capitalism: A Horror Story, the moral of which might best be summed up as capitalism, no; democracy, yes — a tricky distinction for simpletons who think the only alternative to capitalism is totalitarian communism. Moore's shtick as the schlumpy crusader, the Lieutenant Columbo of the Radical Left, has gotten a little tired, or maybe it's just Moore himself who has gotten tired, but in any case he now seems less funny and less inclined to be so than in the past. And as the wit and the invention have thinned, the whine and the sneer in his voice have proportionately thickened. He has still dug up some treasures of found footage (an educational documentary on the fall of Ancient Rome, a Ronald Reagan cowboy film, a newsreel of the near-death FDR proposing his Second Bill of Rights), and he engineers some amusing juxtapositions in the editing room, yet the vast bulk of his movie divides into arbitrary anecdotes of human interest, on the one hand, and on the other a rehash of a subject already well and recently covered, the Meltdown and the Bailout. More simply, economics is by nature a dull subject on screen, and Moore has managed insufficiently to enliven it. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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