Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

alsation72 What if George W. Bush had been assassinated and the ex-CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney was sworn in as U.S. President? An interesting peek at an alternate reality in which the media, racism and knee-jerk reactions combine to reach an outcome. Sounds a little familiar.This does require a certain level of concentration: don't expect to sit back and let a storyline wash over you - you'll have to pay attention. If you do you will enjoy a clever and pretty slick recreation of events that never happened.It is a clever and snappy commentary of our times.It also seems quite timely considering the irresponsible hatred and vitriol directed at Obama by a few loud nut-bags.

MBunge When Death of a President first came out, it sent folks like Rush Limbaugh into quite a tizzy. If you watch it, you'll wonder what all the fuss was ever about. For a movie built on a deliberately provocative idea, the story winds up being nothing more than relatively well-crafted blah.This film is a pseudo-documentary about the assassination of President George W. Bush during a visit to Chicago in 2007. Resembling an episode of the public TV show "Frontline", it weaves real news footage together with fake movie scenes and characters talking to the camera as though they were being interviewed by someone. The story presents the day of the fictional killing and the equally fictional aftermath as something of a mystery while making vague allusions to various elements of the Bush Presidency. It's an unusual idea and that sense of the unusual carries you along for a while, but after watching it for a while you'll probably ask Clara Peller's old question, "Where's the beef?"The conservatives who almost had an aneurysm over Death of a President should have viewed it before throwing their fits. The film depicts George W. Bush more respectfully than he's been presented in any mainstream media since about 2005. It portrays him as a man of character and substance, while showing Bush-era protesters in a fairly bad light. In this movie, President Bush is a good man and his fictional murder is a tragedy on many levels.The film does make some vaguely negative allusions to Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Patriot Act, which is the main problem with Death of a President. Not the negativity about Cheney or warrantless wiretaps, but that the movie never makes more than vague allusions about anything. Fictionally murdering a real person is a bold and arresting concept. It demands a bold and arresting story to go along with it. Filmmakers Gabriel Range and Simon Finch entirely fail to tell such a story. They needed to say something in this movie, something smart, significant and compelling about President Bush, his actions, his America and the nature of his opponents. Range and Finch pussyfoot around all that stuff. Watching this movie should fill you with either anger and disgust or giddiness and admiration. Instead, it'll leave you wondering what the point of it all was. Death of a President should have served as either an indictment of the Bush Administration or an indictment of Bush's critics. It refuses to do either and in so doing, fails to justify its own existence.I don't know if Range and Finch were cowardly or just too caught up in trying to be sophisticated and nuanced. I do know they took an incredibly controversial notion and turned it into a movie that's not worth seeing.

D_Burke "Death of a President" was billed understandably as a controversial film upon its release. In fact, for a while, it was deemed so controversial that it almost wasn't released in the United States. Naturally, Bush supporters spoke out against the movie, as did opponents to the Bush Administration including Hillary Clinton. Then the movie came out, people saw it . . . and the controversy completely disappeared after a week.What happened? Controversial films such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" still resonated heated discussion months, even years, after its auspicious and greatly hyped release. But therein lies a difference between Michael Moore's film and this one. Moore's was factual (depending on whom you ask), and this one was definitely fiction. There's another crucial difference, though. Moore's movie was . . . well made. This one wasn't.The movie had a great premise, but that's only when you look at the film as a hypothetical lesson: For some people (probably really extreme and equally disillusioned liberals), killing President Bush may seem like a good idea given his presidency is officially the most controversial in U.S. History. However, it is in no way a means to an end. In fact, killing Bush would just make the world, and the U.S., worse off than it actually is.The movie communicated that message, but it did so in a very questionable way. The movie seemed to imply that should President Bush be killed by an assassin's bullet, no one except Dick Cheney and other Republicans would care about his death. Then Cheney would become President, pretty much throw away the Constitution by passing Patriot Act III (was there ever a II? Not that I can remember), and the entire nation would just stand aside and let him do it. In my opinion, that's not very likely.Plus, the whole scenario on the search for Bush's killer was way too over the top. The movie again implied that the country would jump right to conclusions and assume that a Muslim did it, while the movie assumes the audience thinks that Muslims in general are the only group of people who hate the Bush Administration. That scenario is way too far fetched, and wasn't very well thought out by the filmmakers. Throughout history, the Secret Service has succeeded in both a.) preventing a President from being fatally wounded by an assassin since 1963, and b.) quickly finding the assassin every time, usually within a few blocks of the killing. This whole scenario which comprised the second half of the movie was where the entire film lost all credibility.The best thing about the film was the editing, and the computer generated scenarios that made it look as though all this really had happened in real time. However, the acting from the people being interviewed in this documentary was shoddy at best, and the novelty of these interviewees really wore off the more unrealistic the movie became.Having said all that, I should note that I am a moderate liberal. In fact, I am a Democrat, and I think the Bush Administration has been the worst and the most corrupt of any administration in U.S. History. Do I hate President Bush? No. Do I hate what he has done to this country? Yes. Do I want him dead? Absolutely not! I'm not saying that because it's a federal offense to say it, either. I'm saying it because it's foolish, ignorant, and unpatriotic to the fullest extent to wish any person, let alone any member of government, to die.I credit this movie for not preaching that message that killing the President would be good for this country. Considering this movie was made by someone outside the U.S., they could have made that message easily while pulling a Roman Polanski and staying out of the country. But this movie was just so full of extreme cases that it was hard to take it seriously. If the film being so crappy saved the life of our President, then I say that's good. But overall, the movie became so forgettable that's it's not even worth recommending.

daveycaspian Firstly I should state that I am no fan of George W. Bush and in fact think he is probably the worst president of the past 30 years. I also do not find the film's subject matter "disgusting." People in the U.S. and elsewhere are free to make a movie exploring the effects of an assassination on George W. Bush or any other public figure. And Americans shouldn't be so hasty to lambaste something since they only bring more attention to it by doing so. With that said: this movie is terrible. It does not belong in a theater; it is a film that screams loudly it was made to be viewed on the internet, or at best as a made-for-TV movie. It is not only poorly made but also unprofessional. It is a fictional movie presented in a realistic manner, yet it comes nowhere near convincing the viewer to take it seriously. The story is poorly told: the movie attempts to lay itself out as a documentary, yet all the while knows itself to be a work of fiction. There are plot twists and severe dramatic elements, neither of which belong in a documentary, which presents solely the facts. The style of the film is terrible; from obviously photo shopped images of interviewed actors appearing with the President, to lame mock-ups of anti-Bush protests, the movie consistently comes across as childish and amateur. The worst part of the film is probably the actors who are interviewed, each one is terrible in their own unique way. And then of course the movie's liberal slant is presented about as subtly as a Dick Cheney gunshot to the face.The movie is not worth seeing, but not because of its controversial subject matter. It is simply a poorly made film that hinges its entire presentation on its controversial statement. It will disappear, as well as it should, from memory and fade into notoriety.