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

Forks Over Knives
Forks Over Knives

By Brent Simon

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brent Simon is a three-term president of LAFCA, a contributor to Screen International, Newsweek Japan, Magill's Cinema Annual, and many other outlets. He cannot abide a world without U2 and tacos.

One thought on “Forks Over Knives Movie Review 2”
  1. Boooo on your review of FOK.  Yes, the narrator has a bit of a monotone delivery.  But the story was WONDERFUL!  “Hectoring tone”?  No, I didn’t hear that.

    It’s NINETY MINUTES LONG!  There’s a lot of little stuff we can all put up with for such VALUABLE lessons.

    “Worked for thousands of years”?  Which diet are you talking about?  Even the movie points out that most native people around the world – who have been eating the same, largely grain-based, diets for centuries – don’t suffer the myriad diseases that we do here in the West, where our ‘nutritional extravagance’ is killing us!

    FORTUNATELY, reading between the lines, I see that, despite your complaints, you really did like the film.  Which you hadn’t given it so FEW stars!

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