I had little interest in seeing this film… but the more I heard it was a blatantly right-wing worship festival, the more ghoulishly curious I became. Would it be that blatant? Would it be that bad a movie? Well, it is that blatant but it’s not as bad as the reviews suggest (having said that, yo, it’s not a good movie).

It stars Dennis Quaid as Reagan… which is poor casting on a good day. He’s old and leathery enough maybe but you can’t make him not have that Quaid smile which is nothing like Reagan. He sometimes does an impersonation of Reagan’s voice and sometimes it just seems like Dennis showed up as himself. That is, when he’s not caked in the most embarrassingly bad young-man makeup. It’s… haunting.

But what are you gonna do… there’s like three recognizable actors in all of right-wing cinema who might sell a ticket. What? Are we casting John Voight or Kevin Sorbo? Voight is too old and… well… yeah calling Sorbo recognizable makes Lucy Lawless chuckle. So Quaid it is… it was either this for him or another dog movie, I guess.

I’ll get the “to be fair” argument out first. To be fair, this film concentrates heavily on Reagan’s fight with communism and the Soviet Union. So if it mostly ignores those little controversies like AIDS and Iran/Contra, you could charitably argue the film isn’t about them.

Still, at over two hours long, the film really could have offered a more rounded image of the guy’s presidency. Maybe they could have replaced the first hour (before he was president) with more meat and potatoes. But nobody who made this movie was interested in suggesting he had any controversies. God forbid the god emperor be anything but mythologized.

The film is in aggressive fast-forward, rapidly bouncing from one moment to the next. You’d better bring in plenty of knowledge to even understand what’s going on. Which, hey, is probably what they were planning anyway. They aren’t trying to inform younger people or Democrats about Reagan, they are hoping for olds who are already bought into his mythology. The ones who think “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” single-handed saved democracy from the Reds.

I was kind of ok with the movie in the first thirty minutes or so… when he was young actor in Hollywood. Until the awkward bouncing through time and uninformative hand waving started. Like voila… he single-handedly defeats Communism in Hollywood. Or when he meets Nancy and they forget to mention he’d divorced his first wife AND has three kids.

I’m giving the movie a low score for being a poorly written and edited biopic… and, yeah, for its one-sided mythologizing. You can’t trust anything it says and if you can’t trust the facts in a biopic, what’s the point of watching one?

It’s a failure… unless you are already among the bought-in hero-worshipers who just want their idolatry confirmed.

Score: 69