absolutely I went to see this where else am I going to see a movie where a young Ronald Reagan is baptized by Kevin Sorbo I'll take one please I will not be asking for my money back so there's a part here that unintentionally sums up the movie pretty well it's when Reagan is talking about candy and he says you can tell a lot about a man by how he eats jelly beans if he grabs a specific color instead of just a handful he has a plan and he's very FOC focused this is a movie that grabs a handful it's a cliffnotes movie and It suffers severely because of this you can take any 10 minutes of it and it's a lot of and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened seriously it's like one of those 10 page bios you'd get at a bookstore and is intended for children and then he was a lifeguard and then he was a DJ now he's married now he's divorced hey he has kids suddenly oh he's an actor now oh hey he's head of the Screen Actor Guild oh now he's selling cigarettes guess he'll run for governor now and why not president there's no character here the movie is so sacran sometimes it's like a movie Reagan would have starred in other times it's a universe so corny it feels like McGruff would really exist in it as an actual cop dog it's all told in flashback from a former KGB agent played by John Voit who isn't bad in it but the younger scenes of him have him caked in so much ridiculous makeup he looks like that Halloween episode of Roseanne where she dressed as a dude even the younger Reagan scenes sometimes look like a Reagan wax sculpture came to life and started playing him that could be forgivable if there were any sort of three-dimensional character here but there's not you're not getting any kind of deep portrait of the man it's very shallow it deifies him so much that it's all pretty one note it's like the Babe Ruth Story where they went into it thinking they were making a movie about Jesus I like when the dude that John Voit is telling the story to is like what does this have to do with anything then Voit continues and talks about a tiger tattoo on a man's ass because it jumps around so much no one really has chemistry with each other except a couple of decent scenes with Reagan and tip O'Neal but whenever he and Nancy are together it more so comes across like I'm watching a screen test and not the actual movie Her role here is just to be oh that's our run the Dennis Quaid performance is interesting sometimes he does work and he would be good casting if the movie had a better script and better Direction instead there's a lot of scenes that look like I'm watching Dennis Quaid hired to do a pretty good Reagan on an episode of Drunk History it's honestly structured quite a bit like Gotti even using some of the same editing tricks like having to put character title cards under people because you wouldn't know who they were otherwise there's a lot of documentaries you could watch instead the 2011 documentary is very nuanced and excellent and there's a pretty cool one called the Reagan show about his use of Television this movie I don't know it's a D+ you're not really getting that much out of this other than it's kind of funny when Sweet Child of Mine plays during the fall of the Berlin wall and there's a scene where an actor plays a young Pat Boon opposite the actual Pat Boon as another character also they left out when Reagan played an Indiana Jones prototype in the movie Hong Kong check out my Cinema Snob episode on that and we'll see you next time [Music]