Review of Death of a President (2006) by Private U — 06 Jun 2007

Death of a President is a despicable little squib of bad faith that flirts with controversy and plays with the audience's expectations in equally careless ways. It's been said that the creative powers (such as they are) behind the movie have the rhythms and tone of American television docudrama down pat, but nothing could be further from the truth. The film poses as a documentary telling of the story of the assassination of W. one year later, but its very structure, which stages the assassination as a murder mystery, belies the documentary premise.

As any viewer in good standing of the History Channel or Discovery will tell you, a sensationalistic TV news doc would cover the same ground as the whole of Death of a President before the first commercial break, and I experienced a rare sinking sensation in the theatre when I realized early in the film what drawn-out, manipulative pacing was in store. The displeasure of being played with, of waiting first to see the assassination, and then waiting until the end of the film to find out--incredulously--whodunnit, isn't helped any by watching ninety minutes of phony documentary interviews with middling actors who fit, in an aggressively average kind of way, some central casting definition of nondescript, pretending to speak off the cuff.

Somehow James Urbaniak got tangled up in this mess. Does this make him the new Hanoi Jane?