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I had heard some good things about this movie. With a political movie like this, acclaim can sometimes fall along partisan lines: Bush supporters will no doubt think it is a smear, while those that oppose him will think it tells the truth. In reality, this movie doesn't do either one and still comes off unbalanced. The job of a president, especially a two-termer like Bush, doesn't boil down easily into a 2-hour movie. Worse still, they are trying to show all the background from Bush's college days, his struggles to find a career, his drinking, and his eventual rise to governor of Texas. The story of Bush as president picks up after the Afghanistan invasion and focuses on the lead up to the Iraq war. I don't know what it focused on after that because I had enough and stopped watching with a half hour to go.

I never cared for Bush, but I also wasn't asleep during his presidency, so I know a lot of what happened. This movie doesn't introduce anything new except that certainly a lot of it is just speculation on what people said. They are getting the general story right, but everyone knows the general story. The whole movie is just a series of nearly random short scenes from the life of George Bush. It paints a picture, but it is a picture we already are familiar with.

So what you end up with is a bunch of performances that aren't making fun of people and yet kind of are making fun of people, only without being funny. Nor are they particularly informative. And with only a few exceptions (Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Toby Jones as Karl Rove) they aren't particularly good either. The movie is very choppy and scattershot. It should have focused on one small aspect of the presidency or his life. Instead this is more like an introduction to George Bush. The effort to put Bush in a negative light seems like sour grapes at a time when everyone has moved on.

There is really no reason to watch this movie.

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