The Front Runner Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I have a weak spot Jason Reitman‘s work, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, even if it was probably Reitman's most interesting project in years, I’m afraid it still turned out to be rather disappointing. First of all, even though it was pretty obvious that Reitman tried to emulate Robert Altman’s directing style with his introduction, I thought it was rather confusing. In fact, at the end, I still didn’t really get who was who exactly. I mean, I can understand that Reitman wanted to go for a realistic approach but it did eventually overcomplicate a story which was rather simple after all. A bigger issue was probably the fact that it was never clear what did they want to achieve with this movie. Indeed, it was never clear if we should feel sorry for Gary Hart, or blame him or blame the medias or the fact that the US presidential campaign has since then become such a huge media circus. Sure, Hart seemed to be quite a brilliant politician but he seemed also to be completely oblivious about the fact that the US president is a major public figure and the fact that the guy kept denying some reasonable expectations regarding his future position made it rather difficult to root for him. It was a similar situation regarding how they handled the media and it was never clear how we should feel about the fact that they covered this story. It’s too bad because I always loved movies about politics but, eventually, I’m not so sure if it was such a great story. The best conclusion I could come up with this tale was that even the most promising politicians actually could turn out to be some oversexed pigs. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch with a very solid performance by Hugh Jackman and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.