R. 1 hour, 39 minutes. At the Chez Artiste.
Chris Evans may have saved the world from a nutty Nazi menace in “Captain America: The First Avenger,” but he gives the performance of his life in “Puncture” — as a true, flawed hero with a much sketchier origin story.
He’s a lawyer. An addict. A john. An exhaustive afterword covers more classifiers, everything from “genius” and “visionary” to “playboy” and “fool.” The fictionalized Mike Weiss is a riveting cinematic creation — the perfect, imperfect combo of crusader and bum.
Filmed in Houston by brothers Mark (who also stars) and Adam Kassen from a script by Chris Lopata, “Puncture” takes on two mighty opponents: the all-powerful medical-supplies industry and, no less dangerous for screenwriters, all that dense and incomprehensible legalese.
The details are arcane, but they boil down to one dying nurse, two struggling personal-injury lawyers and a case that reaches into the national and global arenas.
The setting is 1998. The nurse is Vicky (Venessa Shaw), an E.R. worker who gets stuck on the job with a needle contaminated with HIV. The accident would not have happened, she says, had the hospital used innovative safety needles. But the hospital won’t buy them. The needles’ inventor — played by Marshall Bell — makes the case to Weiss and his partner, Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen).
“Puncture” runs through its plot points with all due diligence, thrumming along on the righteous anger of a well-argued cause. But the truly interesting case is Weiss himself; as an individual, he may be a total wreck, but as counsel and champion for common decency, he’s an unwavering idealist.
And Evans pulls it off.
