Scott Bowles

USA TODAY

Hollywood villainy takes countless forms and motives, but Katie Couric has discovered a unique antagonist in Fed Up: soda pop.

Slickly branded, aimed at kids and as addictive as cocaine, sugared drinks are at the root of an American health crisis visited on the young by corporate snack manufacturers. Or so asserts this unsettling documentary (*** out of four; rated PG; opens Friday nationwide) from broadcast journalist Couric and director Stephanie Soechtig.

And while not as illuminating as the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth (the movies share a producer), Fed Up will change the way you look at junk food. Or at least the companies that peddle it.

Narrated by Couric, Fed Up hardly plays nothing like a TV documentary. Loaded with statistics, doctor testimonials and, most powerfully, the stories of obese children struggling with weight, the film tackles American diets with a ferocity that would make Michael Moore proud. And, like a Moore documentary, Fed Up has been peppered with accusations of inaccuracy by the industry it skewers.

Still, it's hard to argue with the subjects Soechtig discovers: a 14-year-old boy considering lap band surgery; a 12-year-old girl who exercises regularly but can't shed the 30 pounds that have made her a target of taunting; a 15-year-old boy who admits to a crippling fear of type II diabetes — a term that only two decades ago was called "adult onset." This will be the first generation, Fed Up grimly points out, that will have shorter lives than its parents.

What's made the film so contentious since its splash at Sundance in January is its assertion that much of America's weight problem is not the public's fault. Instead, the film takes aim squarely at the snack food industry, which it accuses of getting consumers hooked on processed and fast foods with school tie-ins, deceptive ad campaigns and duplicitous health studies.

It's that last assertion that gives Fed Up its narrative jolt. Exercise alone, Couric says, can't compensate for the sugar and preservatives pumped into foods that have helped make a third of the country overweight.

More damning is the film's use of congressional testimony from industry representatives that sugary drinks and snack foods are a nutritious part of a balanced diet. It smacks of the testimony of cigarette lobbyists a half-century ago, and the film's list of groups that declined to be interviewed, including the Obama administration, runs as long as the ingredients on a bag of corn chips. Fed Up goes so far as to call for the demonization of the snacks industry.

And that's Fed Up's ultimate, if not fatal, weakness: The movie seems to acquit consumers of any culpability in our health crisis. There's a reason it's called junk food, and unlike the air we breathe, we pay handsomely to ingest it. And although most of the parents of the kids are also overweight, there's little reflection on parental roles in kids' expanding waistlines.

But there's no denying the nation's obesity and diabetes crisis, and credit Fed Up for pulling no punches in its examination of a junk food addiction that is, quite literally, tipping the scales against a generation.