Review of The Campaign (2012) by Arousedninja — 25 Oct 2012

"The Campaign" is a new movie with the appearance of two popular comedians, Z. Galifianakis and W. Ferrell. It tells a story of a publicly incompetent person suddenly rising up to challenge a continuous winner of local elections. Their mistakes and errors are shown to be funny, and their connection with a large-scale lobbyists is reminded of throughout the plot.

For me this movie wasn't that funny as it was supposed to be (some of the jokes were just too basic and lame). However, I liked how it showed that the elections are so dependent of rich investments that you could be destroyed in seconds if you lost them. The power of lobbyists is clearly shown as a small town guy with not the best looks or public social skills suddenly becomes a good example to others just by being helped by a not-so-friendly looking campaign manager. And he loses it as soon as he declines to go with the demands of the investors. This jumping between campaign candidates mocks the lack of any decent stability in the rich populace and shows that they are willing to create and destroy people just to get what they want.

If you look closer at the plot and the issues that are being brought up, one can see that the movie basically mocks the every aspect of the election - starting with the lobbyists and even touching the electors themselves. In a sense you could say that the movie is showing how unintelligent the electoral population can be (no offense meant for the US, stuff like that happens all across the globe): for example, one of the candidates gains points even after releasing a sex tape as a positive and proud campaign ad. In addition, the timing of this movie is just too good to be a coincidence (the peak of the US election campaigns), so it just screams that there has to be some hidden messages in the movie that would target the electors and their preferences in the upcoming voting.

The movie has the stereotypical Aristotelian ending (I won't reveal it if you haven't seen it yet), which both enforces the previous ideas and targets of mockery, and strengthens the positive attributes of the characters of the plot. It is a relatively good movie with some material for laughing and for deeper thinking towards the issues raised by the creative crew.