Always on Sunday: Puncture

You like the legal thriller genre? Fan of John Grisham? The 2011 movie Puncture (directed by Adam Kassen and Mark Kassen) isn't based on a Grisham novel, but it does have some similarities to The Litigators (2011).

    The action is driven by the obsessive interest of one partner in a two-man law firm (Mark Weiss, played by Chris Evans). His partner (Paul Danziger, who is played by co-director Mark Kassen) goes along with him at first, but the class action suit they start to pursue soon proves to be much more expensive than they can manage (as Finley and Figg's case is in The Litigators). Weiss and Danziger are up against the heavyweight attorneys of two large, politically powerful hospital group-purchasing organizations and a large syringe manufacturer that have for years been preventing an inventor's retractable syringe from being brought to market. Against the odds, Weiss insists that they "do the right thing."
    The case comes to Danziger and Weiss when they are approached by a nurse who contracted AIDS from being pricked by the contaminated needle of a non-retractable syringe. The attorneys learn that accidental needle sticks were causing thousands of U.S. nurses to be infected by HIV, Hepatitis C, and other infectious diseases every year.
    After an offputting beginning that I can't even remember now except for a sense that the movie started by repelling rather than engaging me, my wife and I found the story and its telling compelling. The lead counsel for the defendants (Jeffrey Dancort, played by Marshall Bell) is so forthrightly representing bad guys that he actually comes across as sympathetic, even as the movie suggests that he had a role in arranging the final act of the movie—which I'll keep to myself so as not to spoil it for you.
    We also found the movie very informative. Weiss and Danziger, it turned out, are real people, and the movie is based on their actual case. As the movie reveals, needle reuse in Africa and Asia was directly causing 1.3 million deaths annually, 23 million hepatitis infections annually, and 260,000 HIV/AIDS infections annually. (According to Wikipedia on the question whether HIV/AIDS in Africa was spread by sex or needle reuse, "research has found that needle reuse, rather than sex, may have been the main cause of the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa.")
    A mixed review of Puncture was published in the New York Times on September 22, 2011.
    We borrowed the DVD from our local public library.