The Players:

Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe: Former research head at Brown and Williamson tobacco, and key witness in a $200 billion tobacco lawsuit

Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino: "60 Minutes" producer, gets Wigand to spill his secrets first on "60 Minutes"

Mike Wallace, played by Christopher Plummer: "60 Minutes" anchor, waffles on whether to support his own piece on Wigand.

Don Hewitt, played by Philip Baker Hall: Head of "60 Minutes," blocks Wigand interview for corporate reasons

Michael Mann's The Insider is an epic-sized film based on the "60 Minutes" tobacco scandal of a few years ago; Mann succeeds in distilling a very convoluted and controversial story into a relatively taut two hours. However, his magnum opus is not without flaws and plays like an uncompleted character study, a film that stops just short of greatness.

The film focuses on Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, a research executive at Brown and Williamson, a tobacco company; he is wrongfully fired from his job and is soon courted by Lowell Bergman, a "60 Minutes" producer, about a possible tobacco-related story. Wigand is the highest-ranking tobacco insider to ever step forward; he knows every dirty little secret about what exactly companies put into cigarettes, and it's not pretty. Dogged by a confidentiality contract, Wigand is at first reluctant to talk; Bergman coaxes him into talking to "60 Minutes," in the interest of the health of the American people, and Wigand finally agrees.

But his life is threatened, his ex-employers hire thugs to stalk and scare him, and his wife leaves with their two daughters; he loses everything for a chance to set the record straight and doubts whether the price was worth it. Meanwhile, Bergman can't get Wigand's interview on the air at CBS; Don Hewitt and the corporate heads fear a multi-billion lawsuit from Brown and Williamson, and Bergman must plead with Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace to get the ground-breaking interview on "60 Minutes." The loose, organic structure of the film works its magic in the first third of the movie; the pacing is deliberate and slow, allowing the film to get under Wigand's skin and into his life.

Crowe's Wigand is undoubtedly the body and soul of the film; Crowe plays Wigand like a modern Hamlet, a quiet, broken shell of a man, and endows him with incredible dignity and grace. In this quietly riveting performance, Crowe captures every nuance of his character's dilemma and slow collapse; he heartbreakingly portrays Wigand's paranoia, depression and bewilderment.

Al Pacino's Lowell Bergman is unrelenting, highly moral, and loyal to Wigand during turbulent times. At first, Bergman's motives for courting Wigand seem a bit suspect and self-serving; there is an intriguing ambiguity to the character that is soon dropped and forgotten, much to the detriment of the character.

Upstaging Pacino is Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace; he's cocky as hell, he's arrogant, he's sometimes petulant, but he's got all the good lines and uses them well. A scenery-chewing performance could have done fine, but Plummer develops Wallace into something other than a flat parody; he makes a dynamic, human journey in minimal screen time and turns in an uncharacteristically strong supporting performance.

With this film, Mann proves that he is at the top of his form as an actor's director. Mann's cameras work in intimate closeness with his actors. And the cast works well with Mann's studied technique, which forces them into ultra-realism under the camera's close scrutiny. But the astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass at CBS. The heroic, moral air that builds up around Bergman in the last third almost suffocates the intricate and brilliant tale before it and threatens to turn the film into a full-blown, us-vs.-them morality tale.

The greatest strength of the film is in its actors but in the last part of the film, Crowe's Wigand almost disappears, and Pacino's Bergman is given scenes full of moral posturing that are completely out of character. After weaving a difficult and astonishing narrative, Mann begins to lose the thread; he sacrifices complexity for black-and-white morality and substitutes shapeless confrontations for emotional depth.

Pace is the film's largest failing; though a deliberate pace helped the first half succeed very admirably, it fails when the tensions are rising by not building to a climax. Mann's film slackens and almost sputters out.