By Debbie Schlussel
Is Kelsey Grammar really a Republican?
Hard to tell, since he chose to be in “Swing Vote” and portray Republicans as anti-Semites and White men as rednecks, idiots, and incompetent fathers.
You know when a movie about a Presidential election begins with an anti-Semitic Republican President scheming on how to keep Jews away from the polls, it’s not going to be even-handed or good. Or funny.
You also know that when the star of a movie–Kevin Costner–is forced to invest $20 million of his own money in an August movie release in order to get it on-screen, it’s not a good flick.

At the beginning of this overly dramatic silver-screen annoyance, it’s election day, and we see Republican President Kelsey Grammar with his evil, scheming political advisor in the Oval Office. While Grammar listens, the advisor (Stanley Tucci) tells the Republican Party of Florida to round up as many tall, blonde, Arian-looking guys they can and send them to the West Palm Beach polling places to keep Jews from voting.
Apparently, Kelsey Grammar didn’t have a problem portraying the GOP as a party of anti-Semites. And it’s downhill from there. This movie is sappy and banal beyond belief. Didn’t care for the term, “right wing blogosmear,” either.
Kevin Costner plays “Bud,” the working-class New Mexico screw-up at the center of a tied Presidential election. He promises his young daughter he’ll vote in the Presidential election, but when he doesn’t show up, she sneaks in and votes for him. An electrical malfunction prevents the vote from registering, and Costner gets to recast his vote later, since it will decide the White House race–the State of New Mexico will decide the race, and it’s tied.
To win his vote, both President Kelsey Grammar and Democratic candidate Dennis Hopper pander to him. When Bud says he thinks gays should get married, Republican Grammar shoots an ad endorsing it. When he says he’s pro-life (he doesn’t know what it means), the liberal Democrat makes a pro-life ad.
Bud is your typical Hollywood version of the middle-American White male: stupid, a drunk, immature, irresponsible, a bad parent, a poor employee, etc. Is there any other kind of White male in America, according to Hollywood (and apparently investor Costner)?
And, of course, like most of these movies, along with the dumb-dopey-working-class-immature-trailer-park-failure-father, there’s a very smart daughter, who is the adult in the movie. Are you as sick of this as I am–that, in Hollywood, the kid is often the adult and vice versa? It gets old. Madeline Carroll, the young actress who plays her, and Paula Patton, the actress who plays an aggressive, scheming local news reporter are so saccharine and phony, it’s unbearable. There is more crying, yelling, screaming, and melodrama in this supposed comedy than five decades of “All My Children.” I couldn’t take much more of this.
But, wait, it gets worse. The most annoying political commentators pollute the screen throughout: Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, Larry King, Tucker Carlson. They’re embarrassing, but, sadly, not embarrassed. The only one missing is Keith Olbermann. Thank Heaven for small favors.
If there was one good thing about this movie–aside from the fact that it actually ended–it was that the movie made a point against illegal aliens taking American jobs, but it didn’t make the point very well.
While Costner works at an egg-processing plant that employs a lot of illegal aliens and makes company announcements in Spanish, he loses his job because he’s a screw-up. While he complains about the problem of “insourcing”–importing illegal aliens into America to take away Americans’ jobs–he is repeatedly late to work, destroys a lot of eggs, and is just a bad employee.
If “Bud”/Costner worked for you, you’d probably be tempted to replace him with an illegal alien, too. But, then again, that’s Hollywood: They can’t even tell the truth about “insourcing”–and that it’s taking jobs from good, hard-working employees.
Worst line in the movie (uttered by campaign manager Nathan Lane to his liberal Democrat Presidential candidate Dennis Hopper):

You wanna win? Go and rip the Statue of Liberty a new one.

Bottom line: This movie stank. It was long, boring, not funny, and not exciting. I laughed like maybe once at the dopey “jokes.” So uninteresting I briefly fell asleep. But don’t worry–the non-stop cloying, maudlin and pseudo-patriotic muzak throughout the movie kept me awake, annoyed, and mostly distracted from trying to hear the dialogue.
If Kevin Costner’s “Bud” is the kind of voter that elects Presidents, perhaps we should become a dictatorship. On the other hand, we already have this system in place, because all of the Presidential candidates go on Oprah. But you’d never see a movie like this, where the one vote is cast by a typically stupid female Oprah worshipper.
The motto of this movie should be, “One man. One vote. No clue.”
SPOILER: After sitting through this horrid film for two hours, there’s no “pay-off,” even if you could legitimately call the end of this movie a pay-off. We’re not shown for whom Bud casts his vote. He goes into the polling booth, and the movie ends. Not that I really cared who he voted for. I just wanted him and his movie to go away.
FOUR MARXES