Title: Forks Over Knives

Director: Lee Fulkerson

Cast: Neal Barnard, Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., Matthew Lederman

‘Forks Over Knives’, from director Lee Fulkerson, fashions itself a hip, savvy treatise on vegetarianism, sort of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for the animal rights and beware-meat, health-conscious set. Instead, it’s a wearying polemic that tests the patience of even those who might be inclined to agree with it.

Fulkerson takes as his two chief crusading subjects biochemist T. Colin Campbell and Cleveland-based surgeon Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. Breaking out the science, they (and others) argue that the health benefits of eating vegetables are vast, and varied. Nipping a page from ‘Super Size Me”s Morgan Spurlock, Fulkerson also does the “personal investigation” thing, opting for an all-veggie diet, and then tracking his own plunging blood pressure and cholesterol counts. The problem is that Fulkerson evinces such a bland, wet-noodle charisma, and this material is so fitfully interwoven, that ‘Forks Over Knives’ fails as a personality-driven endeavor, which has the detrimental effect of further undercutting the more empirical evidence at the movie’s core.

So, too, does the movie’s somewhat hectoring tone, and insistent anti-meat, anti-dairy stance. While fruits and vegetables are understandably an integral part of a healthy diet, Fulkerson seems to arrive a bit too quickly at the notion that a diet that has more or less worked for humankind for thousands of years is now outmoded and ridiculous. A thematically similar recent documentary, Joe Cross’ juice-diet promulgating ‘Fat, Sick & Out of Control’, also centered on a couple subjects who removed meat and diary entirely from their diets, but more as a kind of physical “reset” button.

A populace with a greater awareness of food and general healthiness is a good thing, but there are far better methods of education than the clumsy, repetitive and not very engagingly rendered ‘Forks Over Knives’. Watch the evening news, read a couple books, check out some fitness magazines and lean cookbooks. Don’t feel the need to submit to this agitprop; that’s just laziness in reverse.

Technical: C-

Story: B-

Overall: C-

Written by: Brent Simon