JR 1

I suppose I should not have been too surprised to discover that, as films go, "Reagan" was embarrasingly thin and shallow. It reminded me a bit of those old seasonal children's shows which tell the life of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer. A movie about Reagan could have been so much more compelling than this particular hagiographical fluff piece was. It could have been more laser-focused upon his presidency in the context of the culture of the 1980s and had it been, it could have been phenomenal. The writers and producers squandered that opportunity, however, in order to indulge a conservative fetish. It was less a movie about Reagan, as it happens, than it was a bizarre exhumation of the Soviet Union for the purpose of kicking its corpse in the groin one last time, some 30 years after its collapse. Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" might have, for that reason, been aptly chosen as this movie's theme song. "Reagan" the movie, however, despite the decade which Ronald Reagan helped to define, was no safe space for the likes of Depeche Mode. Instead, John Denver's "Country Roads," was, bizarrely, selected as the poignant go-to theme of this film, despite the complete absence of any connection at all between Ronald Reagan and West Virginia (or, for that matter, the "country"). Apart from a brief stint in Washington, DC, Reagan lived his adult life amidst Hollywood tinsel, glitz, and glamour in Southern California. The point of this film, however, was neither to be a film worth watching (or worth making), nor was it to explore or to express something accurately interesting about President Reagan. The point of this film was to provide American religious conservatives with an opportunity to gush. That's all "Reagan" was about. Accordingly, the experience of watching "Reagan" is, for any viewer not a religious conservative, flat, dull, predictable, and eyeroll-inducing, being neither entertaining nor provocative. It was like something made for broadcast on CBN rather than something made for the box office and the big screen. The acting was, for the most part, substandard (not that the actors had the benefit of a good script, mind you). That is not to say that Dennis Quaid didn't do his best to try to inject some Hollywood into this film despite itself. I don't think any actor cast in the lead role of this dud could have rescued it from itself, however. I'm a bit surprised Dennis Quaid took the role, to be honest. Leaving the theater I could only shrug my shoulders and mutter "A B-movie about a B-movie actor." Perhaps, at the end of the day, that's the best way to look at "Reagan"--a perfectly fitting tribute.