Our Brand Is Crisis

Dir: David Gordon Green

2015

**

There have been few really great political comedies over the years, the ones that make it and are successful are the ones that understand the fine art of satire. Our Brand Is Crisis doesn't understand satire. You could make a comedy with a political theme but you'd be missing a trick not going into political issues but you can't make a worthwhile political film and just inject comedy into it, not without at least some basic satire. Based on the true events captured in Rachel Boynton's 2005 documentary about the political marketing campaign tactics used by American company Greenberg Carville Shrum in representing Gonzalo de Lozada in 2002's Bolivian presidential elections - of which he eventually won, Our Brand Is Crisis is a fictional version, featuring fictional characters and some fictional methods. There is a little bit of stereotyping in the way characters are portrayed but not too much that it isn't acceptable. I'm not sure if the injection of a rival American firm really helped the story much as there were enough challenges already and it turned into a bit of a smarmy, smug-fest.  Making the heads of each company past lovers made it even worse. Producer George Clooney secured the film rights and was set to star and direct, but after five years of development he decided to do neither and the lead character was rewritten slightly and Sandra Bullock was offered the part. Sandra Bullock was the only thing they got right in the entire film. That's slightly unfair of me, Anthony Mackie and Joaquim de Almeida are particularly good in their supporting roles but everyone is let down by the structure and tone of this badly scripted film. When Bullock is on form, she's brilliant, why the makers made her do her physical comedy though I don't know. When the film has an opportunity to be clear, it simply goes down the slap-stick route and gives Bullock allergies. It's not clever or funny. The film has its moments but it is generally predictable, unbelievable (even though it's based on a true story) and disingenuous, which leads me to believe that it was a project that money was invested in that everyone had fallen out of love with. It had many chances to really make something of itself but just didn't. The conclusion should have been something quite profound but it wasn't, it was casuistic and rather forgettable.