Unconscious Voter

Rating: 5/10 (18 September 2017)

If the first casualty is truth then any reporting, on any level, on every war must be a lie. Simple right? Not so. Of great credit to any nation is the finesse with which their propaganda machine can revise, repackage and recreate a lie which has been told a number of different ways already. Grab the gullible with the thinnest veneer of purported reality, then when they forget that it's only a movie, once that magic spell has been cast, take them to wonderland, the chocolate factory and the North pole all at once. Throw in a cross genre spell ingredient like Rom-com fantasy leader Bradley Cooper, and his soulful baby blues, suddenly the producers are atop the highest tower shouting 'show me the money'.
Make no mistake: this is one of those hum-vees. It is only a movie. It has several well used aspects of the film story teller's trade. It has a soundtrack. It has Revillie, several times. It has well practiced film masters offering their expertise in presentation. It attempts to access feelings in the viewer. It seems to do these things acceptably. Acceptably. Not fantastically. Not well. It is no more than a $12 blow job off a corner hooker. Any votes cast in the first few minutes, in the after glow, are dubious at best. When that hooker looks up with big brown eyes in the last moments and says I love you, expect to be spit on. It was interesting, it was even momentarily entertaining, but it was only a story.
Before putting a score to this controversial modern fantasy ask yourself some hard truths about it: Did you manage to keep focus all the way through? Did you ever have the slightest doubt about any of it? Did you want to shout out 'that's not right'? Did you pause and come back? Perhaps you missed something and said 'oh well doesn't matter'. If you can say yes to any of these then ask yourself one more thing before rating this film: was it really that good, at all?