Cast:
Alan Alda (The President of the United States), John Candy (Bud B. Boomer), Bill Nunn (Kabral Jabar), Kevin J. O'Connor (Roy Boy), Rhea Perlman (Honey), Kevin Pollak (Stuart Smiley), G. D. Spradlin (R.J. Hacker), Rip Torn (General Dick Panzer), and Steven Wright (Niagara Mountie) Written and Directed by Michael Moore.
Review:
"I made a film for people like me. People who live in Flint, Michigan or Hamilton, Ontario or Sarnia ... another critic said this is the first left-wing film for the mall crowd ... I consider that a compliment. I wanted to present this hybrid of satire and farce with a mix of politics to get people thinking about a particular issue, in this case, why are Americans led like lemmings to war?"
Michael Moore probably doesn't need much introduction, but maybe my reasoning to select this film does. Simply put, this is a film that became an oddity in his career of over thirty years: a feature film with a narrative. Moore was born in Davison, Michigan, a suburb of Flint in 1954. Not many people can say they went from being elected to the school board as an 18-year-old to becoming a director. Granted, the road to being a director had stops along the way, as he had run his own alternative newspaper for several years before a stint at the magazine Mother Jones, which saw him fired as editor. That loss of his job saw him move back to Flint, where seeing the decline of the city because of layoffs from General Motors (as run by Roger Smith at the time) made him want to film a documentary. After years of funding and production, Roger & Me was release in 1989 that was quite the sensation. A choice vote (i.e. no vote) at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 in regard to the beginning of Operation Desert Storm gave Moore an idea to fester on. The next film Moore did was a short, called Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint in 1992, which, well, raising pets as snake food. He also did television around this time with TV Nation, a satirical news magazine show that was broadcast for two seasons. Anyway, back to the feature film. As mentioned, the idea of a President gaining public support for war against an enemy such as, well Canada, got Moore onto production with Propaganda Films (irony?) in 1993, which was shot on both sides of the USA-Canada border (such as Buffalo, Hamilton, and Toronto). Right before reshoots were to be done, John Candy, who supported Moore every step of the way, died on March 4, 1994. Moore and Propaganda did not get along well for the reshoots (where because of Candy's death meant a handful of scenes were then shot to focus on others), and perhaps his personality does not rub well with certain folks. Haskell Wexler, who shot the film, described Moore as one with "the aw-shucks homespun character that Moore portrays is a complete falsification." The resulting film, released in 1995 on a budget of $11 million, was seen by very few audiences. Moore moved on, doing a book tour and further documentaries (nine as of 2024) across the social, political, and economic topics that interest him, to varying levels of interest.
Honestly, all of that curiosity kind of goes out the window with the result played here. By god, it is so close to being good. It was probably never going to escape that inevitable comparison of Dr. Strangelove, although it at least predates certain films that touch some of the ideas presented here, such as Wag the Dog, another film about a President using the idea of invasion to attract public attention (of course, that was loosely based on a 1993 satirical conspiracy novel). But all that comes through in a sparse 90-minute movie is the thought that this just doesn't click for great laughs. My god! You have Torn and Spradlin (the former is one of Movie Night's favorite people to see on screen) as supporting players for a mediocre lead in Alda and a middling diversion in the quartet of Candy, Perlman, O'Connor and Nunn. You want to like them, and you want to have something to laugh at in those broad jokes (get it? saying beer sucks makes Canadians fight? eh?), but you just get sitcom stuff. Like, heh, sometimes it is funny, but never to a big level for that first hour. The irony of having a handful of recognizable faces is that this is the first film I've seen with Alda (known mostly for M*A*S*H, but I recognize him from The Blacklist [!]) as a lead. He may be playing a "Clintonite". but man is it really not that funny. It begs for something broad, I almost wish Torn was playing the role, because he sweeps the rug right from both Alda and Pollak (mildly funny) in craven fun. Most of the people just don't seem to have that much fun here, where even cameos by Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi just make me wonder what brought them on to do listless cameos (eh? get it? public apologies and having people write Canadian slander in English and French?). One really does wonder just what would have been if Candy had been there for the whole production cycle (he died during production of Wagons East (1994), which apparently was worse). The film just can't strike hard for those looking for broad laughs and it can't really gel well as any grand satire because it just doesn't have the chops to really stick a definitive landing, particularly with its third act. It just feels like a collection of sketches run amok. The jokes are just mild and not very entertaining for a whole film, particularly since the ending doesn't even find anything riotous to say about warmongering or in amusement that hadn't been done in better things. Political firebrand or not, Moore just made a movie that wasn't even worth tearing to shreds or defending to death. A six-star rating out of 10 is sadly appropriate here.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
Next up: Byron Haskin and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1953).
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