Swing Vote
Movie Review
"Swing Vote"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: C+
Rating: PG-13
Released: Friday, August 1, 2008
Directed by:
Cast:
There are three different movies crammed into "Swing Vote," which I don't need to tell you is not the best way of doing things. One is an inspiring patriotic comedy along the lines of "Dave," where you come out of it feeling great about the promise of America. Another is a political satire that lays bare all the cynical inner workings of the campaign process. And the third is a simple drama about a shiftless father getting his act together and restoring his daughter's faith in him.
Collectively, these diverse threads make for one jumbled, over-long movie. I wanted to like it, and I liked many things about it, but man, slicing off about 20 minutes and three subplots would sure improve it.
The premise is that through a fluke of coincidences and irregularities, the presidential election comes down to one guy's vote. That guy is Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner), a functional alcoholic and single father in the tiny town of Texico, N.M., whose civic-minded daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll) was actually doing his voting for him when the electronic voting machine lost power and the ballot wasn't counted. Now the two candidates are tied, with only New Mexico left to be decided -- and the state's popular vote is a dead tie, which means it's all up to Bud to re-cast his vote and decide the election.
A media circus naturally ensues, as both candidates -- the Republican incumbent President Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and Democratic challenger Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) -- descend upon Texico and fine-tune their campaign strategies to appeal directly to Bud Johnson. Bud is a politician's nightmare, a blue-collar, pickup-truck-driving, beer-drinking, low-income man who doesn't know the first thing about the issues and was in fact passed out drunk on Election Day. He has no idea whom to vote for, and now the whole world is waiting on his decision.
The movie (which was directed by Joshua Michael Stern and written by him and Jason Richman) makes it surprisingly easy to accept the fantasy premise of one man deciding a presidential election, creating a situation that is at least vaguely possible, if not exactly probable. (The timeline is drastically condensed, though, with events that would take weeks in real life being shoehorned into 10 days.) It helps that the film has appearances by several real-life newscasters representing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, rather than the fake news channels and talking heads you usually see in movies, and that the situation is treated fairly realistically. The Republican and Democratic campaign strategists (played devilishly by Stanley Tucci and Nathan Lane, respectively) are about as crafty as you'd expect, and both candidates are plausible politicians rather than caricatures. Dennis Hopper hasn't seemed this sane in years! (Trivia: He and Kelsey Grammer are actually both staunch Republicans.)
We move into the satire portion of the evening's program when Boone and Greenleaf start shamelessly pandering to the special-interest group known as Bud Johnson. Boone sends a NASCAR hero to pick up Bud at his trailer and drive him to meet the president at Air Force One, while Greenleaf recruits Willie Nelson to film a TV commercial that addresses Bud directly. Both candidates express discomfort at the idea of completely reversing their positions on the issues just to get Bud's vote, but then they do it anyway, resulting in outrageously over-the-top campaign ads that earn some of the movie's biggest laughs.
Bud and Molly's relationship seems based on Homer and Lisa Simpson's, with the precocious youngster acting as her jackass father's conscience, teacher, and babysitter. The 12-year-old actress Madeline Carroll is terrific, easily holding her own among the more experienced cast members, and really selling the emotions in a crucial scene where she expresses her love for her screw-up father to her school class. Kevin Costner, meanwhile, is almost always likable when he appears in comedies, though here he sometimes lays on the "Aw, shucks!" hick persona a little thick.
After some unnecessary tangents involving an unscrupulous TV reporter (Paula Patton) and her boss (George Lopez), and Molly's relationship with her absentee mother, the film finally comes around to its faith-in-America-restoring finale -- which is what it should have been focusing on the whole time. An inspiring musical score has been playing throughout the film, but it isn't until these last minutes that it actually fits. I feel good about where things end up. I just wish there hadn't been so many sidetracks and tonal shifts leading up to it.
Grade: C+
Rated PG-13, a lot of profanity, one F-word
1 hr., 59 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 11 comments
August 1, 2008 at 9:46 am
I'm so disappointed in this review. I thought you would slam this movie with a nice D or lower. A premise that completely ignores the electoral college (Gore actually won the popular vote in FL) and is totally implausible while trying to look intelligent looked like an easy target for Eric, especially, when it stars Kevin Costner and isn't a sports comedy. I can't wait for another martin lawrence movie to come out, so that i can really see you unleash your wrath again.
August 1, 2008 at 5:22 pm
The movie doesn't ignore the electoral college. Maybe you should actually see it before you decide it's terrible. :-)
August 4, 2008 at 6:15 am
Wentzel25: Please don't ask us to believe the lie that Gore won Florida. He lost by 537 votes in the final count. You can look it up.
It's said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Yet that's what Democrats did in Florida back in 2000 with all those selective recounts. Numbers are objective, even if we don't like them.
August 5, 2008 at 3:50 am
I liked your review although I would have given it a B-. I thought the characters were well developed and the plot interesting enough, and definitely timely. Molly's character was endearing and believable. The ending wasn't thought through, however. We were introduced to Bud's "dysfunctional" lifestyle and Molly's overcompensating childhood maturity. They should have had a longer period of developing Bud's awareness of civil responsibility. The turnaround was too abrupt to be believable. The ending although not well developed... left me feeling hopeful. I didn't care about the direction of his vote and am not surprised by the final scene.
August 9, 2008 at 4:33 am
The day "Swing Vote" came out, it had a 50% tomato rating on www.rottentomatoes.com. Plus Eric gave it a mediocre C+ rating. This is just hilarious to me since the entire movie is about a split decision. (Current tomatometer is only 38%, though, so perhaps a loser has emerged from this particular election.)
October 4, 2008 at 3:00 am
Just an additional point of clarification on what "Another Eric" and "Wentzel25" said:
1) Bush did win Florida (by the objective count) by a few hundred votes.
2) Almost 1/2 million more people voted for Gore than for Bush in the total popular vote.
You tell me, did the system work?
October 4, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Matt, I would say the system did work. It was intended to let the smaller states actually have some importance in a national election- and for that reason alone, I like it. If this never happened (popular vote winner/elecotoral college loser), then the sysytem didn't work. The reason being we would just use the popular vote and only the big states would have the power. There is no way of knowing if Gore would have won the popular vote if that's what counted. Just like Kerry might have won the popular vote in 2004 if that's what the system was based on. Why you ask? Well, all of the campaign money that was spent to win the swing states would have mainly been spent in N.Y., California, and Texas. etc. Since winning those states by a huge margin would have been of most importance, you can't tell how the final vote counts would have changed (it would have been very different). I also like the electoral college because if you are from a swing state, there is a better chance of your vote counting in a way (look at how close Ohio was in 2004 and Florida in 2000 was). The margin of victory in the popular vote has a much greater chance of being too big to really think your vote "counted".
October 6, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Aw, jeez, lookit what you've done, Wentzel25!
You just had to mention the 2000 election, didn't you? Now that's all the comments will be about. Won't that be fun? Rabid argument about an election 8 years ago that we can't do anything about now, rather than rabid arguments about this movie. Whee!
October 6, 2008 at 11:01 pm
This is fun, hijacking old movie reviews to further the political debate that's running rampant throughout the entire site.
Go Huckabee!!
October 7, 2008 at 4:03 am
Well Seripa, not all of the comments on this site are about the movie or Eric's review. Just look at "Religulous" and "An American Carol" as Eric stated. As for the comments being about an 8 year old election that we can't do anything about now...........I was just talking about the electoral college VS. popular vote. It can still be very relevant today. Can you imagine if Obama wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College...............there will be riots in the streets that nobody has ever seen before. Now, there shouldn't be because of the reasons I stated in my last post- but it would be crazy to say the least.
October 17, 2008 at 4:23 am
I saw this movie on the plane and thought the 12 year old daughter was the only halfway decent thing in it. I can see your rationale for a C+ but I would give it a D+. The + is for Nathan Lane.