Movies on DVD: Death of a President

One wonders how a film about the assassination of President George Bush could be unbias in any way, yet Death of a President manages to accomplish this feat. At first I was also dubious that this subject matter could fill ninety minutes, thankfully, I was somewhat wrong in this regard. Death has a wide array of characters presenting the story of the assassination, obviously nobody who is real presents any sort of interview segment; Bush and the rest of the fearless leaders of the free world appear in archive format, with reused speeches and news footage amounting to Bush’s role in the movie. Highlights of the interview portions include Becky Ann Baker as Bush’s speech writer, namely because she’s one of the few likable characters; almost everyone else is presented in negative light one way or another. This is the reason I saw it manages to be unbias in it’s presentation: it’s like the bad side of everything and everyone. The protestors are violent and out-of-control; the Secret Service agents are paranoid, classist, and racist; and of course the American public is blissfully ignorant. And unfortunately, it is hard to listen to some of these highly unlikable characters after a while, especially when everything they’re saying has already been repeated ad nauseum; this is the film’s major weak point, it would be much better off with fifteen to thirty minutes cut out. At the end of the day though, this film points out a few things that you may not have thought of before, and at the very least, ought to make us wary with the bleak picture it paints, because I do truly believe that if someone did assassinate Bush, the backlash would be exactly what happens in this movie, if not worse.

My IMDB Rating: 6 Stars