Wanna Buy a Lung? Making a Mockery of Organ Trafficking in Inhale

Details

Inhale
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
IFC Films
Opens October 22, IFC Center

Related Content

• These Guns: Mark Wahlberg's One Last Job in Contraband
  January 11, 2012
• Miserable Clan Gets a Second Act in The Family Tree
  August 24, 2011
• Butch Cassidy is Alive and Well and Living in Blackthorn
  October 5, 2011
• Save the Humans! Actors and Whales Trapped in Big Miracle
  February 1, 2012
• Jane Fonda As An Eccentric Granny
  March 21, 2012

More About

• Sam Shepard
• Rosanna Arquette
• Reykjavik
• Paul Chaney
• Organ Transplantation and Donation

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Ripped from the headlines and sensationalized for your would-be pleasure, Inhale uses the appalling phenomenon of illegal organ trafficking as the basis for an almost-as-appalling hyperventilated thriller. Opening and closing cards inform us that organ demand outpaces supply by a ratio of 10:1, and that 15,000 people annually are “farmed” for their organs, which puts a sober public service frame around one seriously unhelpful piece of cockamamie fiction. Dermot Mulroney plays Paul Chaney, a Santa Fe D.A. whose young daughter is in dire need of a double lung transplant, and whose attempts at finding her a legal donor have all failed. Told of illegitimate alternatives by a concerned doctor (Rosanna Arquette), given a mysterious referral by a local politician (Sam Shepard, who spills the beans only after a heated, shirt-tearing, golf-green showdown), and encouraged by his wife (Diane Kruger, utterly wasted), he heads south of the border to rustle up a set of Mexican lungs. In lawless Juárez, he survives local gangsters and corrupt cops, panders to adorably disheveled street kids and a sacrificial transvestite, and learns, via show-stopping exposition, that bootlegged organs are taken out of poor people. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík) gilds an already florid lily with needless gore, a bombastic score, and a climactic ambulance chase cross-cut with the last gasps of a dying child. The road to arthouse ruin is paved with good intentions.