In the end, it comes across as more of a gimmick than a bona fide film.
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10/27/06
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Death of a President (2006)
37
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Reviews Counted:98
Fresh:36
Rotten:62
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: In this unconvincing fictional documentary, the tense 30 minutes that lead into the title event is outweighed by the boring, melodramatic hour preceding it.
Theatrical Release:Oct 27, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $167,000
Synopsis: Winner of the International Critics' Prize at the Toronto Film Festival, "DEATH OF A PRESIDENT" is conceived as a fictional TV documentary broadcast in 2008, reflecting on a monstrously despicable... [More]
Starring: George W. Bush, Becky Ann Baker, Michael Reilly Burke, Hend Ayoub
Director: Gabriel Range
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Reviews for Death of a President
Aside from its fake assassination, Death of a President hasn't much of substance: warmed-over criticism of the Patriot Act and the Iraq war, in a form less trenchant than your nightly dose of Jon Stewart, or even Chris Matthews.
10/27/06
No reasonable person will come away from [DOAP] feeling that the film promotes... acts of violence. So it is a bit odd that this film gets tabbed 'controversial' when an exercise in sadism like Saw III is sure to be written off as scary fun.
10/27/06
It will only leave Bush supporters wondering how one man can put up with so much hate. And it may leave Bush critics asking why they just spent $10 and 90 minutes on something that's more controversy than content.
10/27/06
Top CriticD.O.A.P. offers no information, insights or ideas that a couple of political science majors couldn't come up with while hanging out between classes.
10/27/06
Top CriticWhile it dazzlingly manipulates snippets of film to create a genuine-looking docudrama, its knee-jerk, black-and-white political imagination never equals its technical expertise.
10/27/06
Aside from satisfying some kind of ghoulish curiosity about how such an incident could possibly happen, there's precious little in Death of a President to justify the extremity of its central conceit.
10/27/06
Range's movie is notable more for its superficial gimmick -- and the publicity campaign trying to cash in on the 'controversy' surrounding it -- than it is for its ideas, which are few and familiar.
10/27/06
As cleverly as the movie pastes together an assassination (using among other things, actual footage of Bush in Chicago and real Bush protesters), its aftermath is prosaic.
10/27/06
Death of a President is a masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.
10/27/06
Death of a President manages to be predictable and astounding at the same time.
10/27/06
To the credit of Range and Simon Finch, with whom he wrote the screenplay, it makes its point and poses its moral questions without speeches or quotation marks.
10/27/06
Top CriticIt starts strong but quickly turns into a standard murder mystery that has few surprises and fewer thrills.
10/27/06
I won't tell you how the story resolves the question of who killed the president. I will tell you that it involves a careless reading of American society by a director who apparently hasn't totally thought through what he's saying.
10/27/06
Top CriticThere's a cowardice at work here. Playing with the powerful tools of documentary, it poses as artistically courageous when it's often little more than a muddied if familiar meditation on the sorry state of affairs the U.S. finds itself in in Iraq.
10/27/06
I give nothing away by telling you the president dies. From that point on, the film's most egregious offense is becoming predictable and heavy-handed.
10/27/06
Top Critic[DOAP] wants to function as a mindless thriller that eventually makes us think -- and only after the film is over question the form that encouraged us to be mindless. These are incompatible agendas, and in the end neither is fully successful.
10/27/06
Top CriticThe whole film has the whiff of a low-cost documentary unspooling on a basic cable channel on Sunday afternoon when you should be out raking leaves.
10/27/06
And the point is … what, exactly?
10/27/06
Top CriticThe film prompts thought about things like the situation of peaceable Muslims in post-9/11 America, and about the always-precarious status of civil liberties in a time of war.
10/27/06
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