Death of A President - movie review! (******6/10)
Death of a President is an interesting movie. It came out in 2006, and tells the (obviously ficticious) story of the assassination of George W. Bush through newsreel footage, manipulated computer images and faux-documentary style actors. Unfortunately, that’s all it is, is interesting. There was a time where this was the most controversial movie in the world, but that controversy (as so often happens) existed only before anyone actually saw the film. The movie is very well done and very convincingly shot. Dick Cheney’s press conferences have been expertly manipulated to show him delivering eulogies and talking about the death of Bush. The actors are all good. The story follows up on the assassination as Cheney adds more teeth to the Patriot Act (’cause that’s what it needs), and a young man appears to be falsely convicted of the murder, and he is quickly executed.
The thing the movie fails to do, which I was hoping for, is have an opinion either way on Bush and Cheney and anti-Bush protesters and any other party that might be involved in a scenario such as this one. The reason it caused such controversy was that it imagined the assassination of a real man, the sitting president at the time of the movie’s release. Much like the documentaries of Michael Moore, the right wing jumped all over this as blasphemous before they had even seen it, and in most cases they stated unequivocally that they would never watch it. They assumed it would be filled with anti-Bush, anti-neocon rhetoric, and come out wholly on the side of those who would muder the president. But it doesn’t. And it doesn’t attack them either. The movie doesn’t seem to be squarely on any side, nor does it create any truly provacative ideas. And that is the problem. It ends up just being a bunch of stuff that happens.
While Death Of A President is very watchable, and certainly interesting, and resonably insighful, there is nothing new here, and when it’s over the film had been unable to make me feel one way or another about this imagined assassination. If Gabriel Range had really wanted to make a controversial movie that would be remembered for years to come, he would have made sure that he took a stance on one side of Bush or the other. As it stands, the controversy came and went, as will this movie.