Review of The Campaign (2012) by Harry W — 22 Mar 2013

The Campaign tries to be a clever satire of American politics as well as a parody of one, but director and writer Jay Roach fails to find a balance between the two.

Primarily it's because the script is inconsistent with it's characters and pretty much relies on them to work it out for themselves, and also there's a fairly thin plot.

Luckily, they more-or-less do. If you actually consider the plot of The Campaign and look into its words, you'll realise it features a similar satire to The Dictator in the sense that it is so overly ridiculous that it's really funny. And if you take a look at the campaigns of each respective character, you'll notice that not once do they actually deal with any issue in serious politics. And although this may seem like its because the writers forgot it, if you look at it in the right frame of mind it's easy to see that it's all for the sake of the ridiculous satire which seems to be a rising thing in modern comedy.

The jokes seem to be rather hit-and-miss, and you have to be fans of both Will Ferrell and Zachary Galifinakis, but if you are then you'll find yourself laughing at this homage to American politics.

Will Ferrell's lines seem to be recycled from his older jokes and are a fairly reliant on offensive language, but nevertheless he manages to provide substantial laughs to the viewer.

Zach Galifinakis seems to succumb to similar problems, except that instead of having a character ridden with vulgar language, his characterisation seems to be stereotypically based off Jack Black's performance as Bernie Tiede in the 2011 Film Bernie, and so it doesn't seem like he has supplied anything new in terms of characterisation to The Campaign. But that aside, yes I got some laughs out of him and found that he portrayed his Bernie-Ripoff character very well, despite being a little stereotypical.

So The Campaign can't contrast with the earlier works of Will Ferrell and Zachary Galifinakis, but it's great to see them working together with such hilarious chemistry, and that's the reason to see The Campaign.