Michael Moore explores corporate dominance in Washington in his new film Capitalism: A Love Story. (Alliance Films)

For 20 years, filmmaker Michael Moore has been exposing the illnesses of modern America, one disease at a time. First he went after corporate callousness (Roger & Me), then gun-toting paranoia (Bowling for Columbine). After that he targeted war-mongering politicians (Fahrenheit 9/11) and the health-care system (Sicko).

In Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore finally rips off the whole bloody bandage, revealing what he sees as the crux of the problem: a profit-driven economic culture whose mantra of greed has drowned out the voice of democracy.

Michael Moore’s films used to be prescient, or at the very least powerfully urgent. Capitalism: A Love Story, by contrast, seems behind the curve.

Trouble is, just as he’s ready for his biggest fight ever, our little-guy champion has become tired. He admits it himself, at the end of this sprawling documentary-slash-editorial. By then we've already guessed as much. You can hear his weariness in that sad, patient voice of his, once witty but now mostly subdued. And you see it in those well-worn stunts he half-heartedly trots out, like backing an armoured car up to Wall Street banks to take back the “people’s money,” or trying, yet again, to talk to the head honchos at GM.

The first indication that Moore is off his game comes right after the movie’s energizing punk intro — Iggy Pop singing his political spin on Louie Louie to flickering security-camera footage of bank robberies. An uninspired Moore dusts off one of those corny old educational videos he loves and makes a wheezy comparison between the U.S. and imperial Rome. A reference to the emperor is juxtaposed with a shot of Dick Cheney, the Roman circus with reality TV... you get the picture. Soon, however, he’s ditched the sophomoric satire and is pouring on the tears and violins as he documents financially devastated families losing their homes. We watch them, trying to salvage some dignity while stony-faced sheriffs bang on their doors. How, Moore asks, did the American Dream — read: the prosperous 1950s of Moore’s childhood — go so horribly wrong?

His first villain is the late U.S. president Ronald Reagan, one-time B-movie actor and corporate shill, who, Moore reminds us, slashed taxes for the rich, neutered the unions and ran America like a big business. Cue another of Moore’s visits to his rust-belt hometown of Flint, Mich., whose economic collapse in the Reagan years prompted Moore’s 1989 debut, Roger & Me. In the wake of the Bush-era subprime mortgage fiasco, Flint has ironically become home base for a company that mails out foreclosure notices across the rest of the benighted country.

Moore looks for answers at the investment banking headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Manhattan. (Alliance Films)

Moore briefly picks up steam when he starts showing us egregious examples of a society where profit matters above all else. They include underpaid airline pilots forced to live on food stamps and teens unjustly incarcerated in a Pennsylvania detention centre because judges were getting kickbacks from the home’s operator. Then there are the corporations that take out undisclosed life insurance policies on their employees, allowing them to collect handsomely when the employee pops off. Moore is suitably aghast at this so-called “dead peasant” insurance. He wonders where the term comes from, but can’t be bothered to find out. It might well derive from Nikolai Gogol’s classic Russian novel Dead Souls, which involves a similarly devious scheme.

Moore’s laziness, however, is most irritating when he sets out to penetrate the financial machinations of Wall Street. Stockbrokers and economists try fumblingly to explain derivatives to him, while he stares at them blankly like a kid in a remedial math class. It made me think of a far more effective film about financial duplicity, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which put the energy giant’s book-cooking into comprehensible layman’s terms. In retrospect, that 2005 documentary also foreshadowed the recent financial meltdown — it made you wonder, if the banks and regulators were wilfully ignorant of Enron’s massive fraud, who’s to say others weren’t pulling the same kinds of scams?

Moore’s films used to be prescient, too, or at the very least powerfully urgent. I was in Washington, D.C., when Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, and the audience response was electrifying. Sicko, released in 2007, augured the current health-care reforms being pushed by the Obama administration. Capitalism, by contrast, seems behind the curve. It tells us little we don’t already know from reading the news, and Moore’s choice of talking heads is poor, if not downright bizarre. Why ask actor-playwright Wallace Shawn to explain capitalism (which he does poorly), when you could speak to insightful authors like Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) or Larry Elliott (The Gods That Failed)?

Then there’s the unrelenting pathos, which comes dangerously close to being exploitive. There’s a heartbreaking scene where the children of a young mother, one of Wal-Mart’s “dead peasants,” weep as they recall her death. Moore shamelessly uses their grief to underscore Wal-Mart’s cupidity, as if decent corporate behaviour would somehow make them less sad.

Just when the film threatens to become a total bummer, however, Moore finds glimmers of hope — beginning with the election of President Barack Obama and his platform of change. Moore also finally addresses the big unanswered question — if not capitalism, then what? He can’t bring himself to use the C word, but opts for “socialism,” which in the U.S. seems to mean the same thing. But in case his Middle American audience thinks he’s a godless pinko commie, Moore also talks to Catholic priests who tell him Jesus was down on capitalism, too.

Capitalism: A Love Story is meant to rouse its audience to action in the style of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but it’s the least-compelling Moore documentary to date. Maybe it’s time for our blue-collar crusader to put down his bullhorn and reconsider his strategies.

Capitalism: A Love Story opens Oct. 2.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.