Saturday, 15 September 2012

Mini-Review: The Campaign




It seems like a great idea to have two of the most popular comedic actors around share a movie together whilst also mocking the world of politics. It is, but not as much as you would hope.

Congressman Cam Brady is about to run for his fifth term in congress for the 14th district of North Carolina, Cam is unopposed until political unknown Marty Huggins enters the race under advisement from his father and his fellow corrupt businessmen who want to use Marty to further their own financial interests. Cam and Marty soon become tough rivals and resort to increasingly dirtier tactics in order to sabotage each other’s campaign.

Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis are the real draw for this movie so it’s just as well that they are great in it. Both are given equally zany characters and it really is a hilarious thing to watch them both descend deeper into political mud slinging throughout the movie. Dylan McDermott and Jason Sudeikis both shine in supporting roles as Galifianakis’s and Ferrell’s respective campaign managers and match the two leads in terms of comedy.

The humour of the film is thankfully not restricted in terms of its age rating so there are plenty of hilarious jokes aimed at a mature audience. The script is very clever in some parts of the movie and excels thanks to its unlimited capacity to go to “that place”. However a huge portion of the characters in the film are so minimally written that they barely register as a human being whilst others are so hammily developed that they take the viewer out of the scene completely.

With a movie like this it is almost always a given that it will end up being a mediocre affair that has been built up to audiences through its trailer, and that upon viewing the film they discover that all of its comedic highlights were in the previews. One thing I can say for sure about ‘The Campaign’ in regards to that is this, it is a funnier film than its trailer but it is not as funny as you want it to be.


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