Death of a President: Critic Reviews

Death of a President begins as a disturbingly clever stunt but concludes as a contradiction, a political nightmare of haunting banality.

The best that can be said about Gabriel Range's opportunistic fake-umentary is that it faithfully recreates the tone and rhythm of a second-rate American television program.

As skillful an artist as (director Gabriel) Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

The 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.

There's a far more subversive political mock-umentary coming next week. I invite President Bush, Senator Clinton, and all politicians to get down with Borat.

D.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.

Mr. Range is a talented man who knows how to control images and emotions, up to a point. By virtue of its subject, however, Death of a President takes on an unreal life of its own. The film itself becomes a riderless horse.

There'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.

What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair -- in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?

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.

The flaw in Death of a President isn't one of morality. It's one of dramatic interest.

[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.

While 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.

Death of a President manages to be predictable and astounding at the same time.

Layering the sense of dread with measured expertise, Range does a formidable job visualizing the circumstances surrounding the crime.

Those expecting a cinematic Molotov cocktail are in for a dose of NyQuil.

Every thinking person should see Death of a President.

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.

Range has a marvelous feel for the cliches and conventions of TV-news documentary, and the tone of mournful elegy he strikes here is both convincing and -- believe me, I'm shocked to be writing this -- moving.

It's a stunt more than a movie, and if this is what's passing for intelligent liberal thought in this (or any other) country, we're really in trouble.

Just as the ducks get lined up in a row and we're ready for the movie to reveal its true purpose -- Political satire? Paranoid dystopian fantasy? Apologia for the Bush administration? -- we suddenly realize it has none.

Death of a President is celluloid mediocrity. It's neither interesting nor convincing.

Although slick and clever, the ethnics of this fake docu about an imagined assassination of Bush are woeful.

And the point is ... what, exactly?

The fact of the Bush years far outdoes Range's dull fiction. The only thing that shook me was the idea of Cheney as president. Now that is the stuff of nightmares.