The Bizarrely Pro-Blacklist Hagiography Reagan is the Worst Movie I've Reviewed Here Since Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
At least that garbage wasn't ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE MINUTES LONG
Back when I was a professional film critic and people would ask me what I did for a living, they would sometimes say, “I don’t envy you having to watch all those terrible movies” when I told them my profession.
I would smile, pat them on the head condescendingly, and deliver my standard line about how a bad day at the movies was still better than the best day at the coal mine.
Besides, I love terrible movies! They’re my thing! I’ve written books and columns about bad movies and have a podcast, Travolta/Cage, that regularly, even obsessively, chronicles that endlessly fascinating subject. My World of Flops, my column about the biggest disasters in film history, is currently in its SEVENTEENTH year and its third stint at The A.V. Club.
I have spent my life and career happily, eagerly watching the worst in entertainment and Reagan kind of broke me. I can’t recall the last time I had less fun at the movies.
Last night, I saw a movie that posed a formidable challenge to my conviction that the worst day at the movies is better than the best day at the coal mine.
Suffering through the 135 minutes of hysterical right-wing propaganda that constitutes Reagan had me thinking that maybe working in a coal mine might not be that bad after all, Black Lung and possible fatal cave-ins included.
I love this newsletter’s paid subscribers. They pay me a modest sum every month, and in exchange, I have to do their bidding. I’m a bug-eating, half-mad Renfield to their power-mad Count Dracula. Incidentally, in the 36 hours between when I posted this and when it’s published, I’ve lost four of the site’s 210 or so paid subscribers, which means that some sick souls might have voted for Reagan purely out of spite, then immediately deleted their pledge. It’ll take me months to make up that twenty dollars of lost income. I wish I were joking.
I wearily concede that I did not love all paid subscribers last night. I found myself bitterly resenting everyone who voted for Reagan over Chris Weitz’s Afraid.
I get it! You want me to see horrible movies so that I can eviscerate them in an amusing fashion. I enjoy that. But Reagan is no garden variety bad movie. It’s something closer to an endurance test I barely passed. I really had to push through my overwhelming desire to stop watching Reagan and finish the damn thing.
While Afraid astonishingly did as poorly with critics as Reagan, easily the worst movie I’ve seen in a theater this year, it’s only eighty-four minutes long.
Only eighty-four minutes long! That’s so short! That’s specifically FIFTY-ONE minutes shorter than Reagan. That’s nearly an extra hour.
That is SO FUCKING LONG. Christian movies generally understand on some level that they fucking suck and that audiences only suffer through them to suck up to Jesus, so they at least have the decency to mostly be on the short side.
Not Reagan. It lasts well over two hours that pass like two agonizing days.
Last night was rough. I saw the 9:40 screening. If I go to the movies for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas after my family is asleep on Thursday, I have the whole weekend to myself, and I can get my review up in a timely fashion.
There was a good half-hour of previews for this 9:40 screening of a 135-minute movie that I would never have seen if it hadn’t won the poll, and I wasn’t obligated to cover it for my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror. All told, my Reagan experience lasted just under three hours.
One of the trailers was for professional transphobe Matt Walsh’s new documentary. Life is too short to listen to that man’s voice or look at his eminently punchable face, so I ducked into the lobby until something less repugnant was being sold.
I have written about every narrative movie about the Hollywood blacklist for my massive upcoming book The Fractured Mirror, which you can preorder here. The soft and safe message of all of them is that the Blacklist was bad and that McCarthy creep was a real jerk, and it is a permanent stain on Hollywood history that the industry cowardly gave in to Red Scare hysterics.
For understandable reasons, movies about the Hollywood Blacklist generally have little to say about the subject beyond the House of Un-American Committee being un-American and evil.
Seemingly everyone agrees that the Blacklist represented a tragic and destructive overreaction from a paranoid nation and an industry that saw Communist infiltration everywhere, with the notable exception of the makers of this flag-waving, Commie-hating, Jesus-loving travesty.
The worshipful ode to the actor-turned-politician comes out strongly in favor of the Red Scare, the Cold War, and the Blacklist. In its revisionist take, the movie business faced an existential threat from Bolshevik union agitators taking orders from Moscow.
Reagan stars every Christian and Republican and Christian Republican in Hollywood, which means we get Robert Davi as Leonid Brezhnev and the dude from Creed who was filmed getting blowjobs alongside Kid Rock as Frank Sinatra. And yes, Kevin Sorbo introduces li’l Ronnie Reagan to a righteous dude with some “far out” ideas named Jesus.
When I saw Scott Stapp as Frank Sinatra, I let out an involuntarily, “No, no, no!” I just wanted it to stop. It was all so heavy-handed and so wrong. That describes all of Reagan.
This isn’t a movie. It’s right-wing propaganda that crams canned uplift down the audience’s throat for well over two hours. The score goes overboard on soaring strings that never stop reminding us that we are watching the inspirational story of a great Christian, a great Republican, and a great man.
Only one man possessed the testicular fortitude to take on Marxists eager to use Hollywood as a propaganda arm for the Soviet Union: Ronald Reagan, AKA the greatest human being and Christian ever to bless this planet with his sublime presence.
Watching Reagan reminded me of a classic, Robert Smigel-written sketch called “Ronald Reagan: Mastermind” about how the Gipper only pretended to be a doddering lightweight happy to while away his days doing photo ops and giving speeches to friendly audiences when he’s really a ferociously driven, hands-on obsessive intimately involved with everything his administration is doing, particularly clandestine endeavors.
The humor in the sketch comes from the impossible gulf between the hardass, take-charge alpha male bizarro world Reagan and the real actor turned politician.
Reagan essentially functions as a non-comic, non-ironic version of “Ronald Reagan: Mastermind,” where the Great Communicator isn’t just the greatest Christian and anti-Communist ever to bless this great land with his presence; he’s also sharp-witted, intimidatingly intelligent, informed, a voracious reader who seems angry all the time because his life’s work single-handedly destroying Communism in Hollywood and then global Communism is taking so long.
Reagan’s hoky framing device finds Jon Voight’s ex-KGB agent Viktor Ivanov talking to an underling about how the Soviet Union foolishly underestimated Ronald Reagan but learned to not only respect him but worship him as a man-God perfect in word and deed who took on a nation of hundreds of millions and kicked their Marx-loving behinds. ALL OF THEM.
Voight is better known these days for wild-eyed monologues on Twitter about how Donald Trump is the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln and that God will turn against the United States with great vengeance if it turns its back on its Lord and savior, Donald Trump.
Imagine fifty times more of that, but with a laughably awful Russian accent and about Reagan’s undeniable genius, and you have a sense of Voight’s role in the proceedings.
It feels suspiciously timely that Reagan portrays its titular hero surviving an assassination attempt as incontrovertible proof that God is on his side and protecting him. This is not unlike when the Lord, in all his wisdom, pushed a bullet out of the direction of Donald Trump’s major arteries and into a firefighter who I’m sure was a real jerk and, unlike the twice-impeached ex-president/felon, deserved to die.
The narration is constant because the filmmakers believe in showing and telling and then telling some more, particularly about Reagan and how amazing he was.
Ronald Reagan was known for his warmth and his humor, but Dennis Quaid portrays him as a Cold Warrior who was continually enraged by Commie union organizers and dope-smoking hippies and that Jimmy Carter creep.
Quaid’s Reagan is perpetually apoplectic. He’s hopping mad and forever spoiling for a fight against his ideological enemies and an Evil Empire that he is intent on bringing down in no small part due to its Godlessness.
In this ridiculous hagiography, the Bedtime for Bonzo star towers triumphantly as an anti-Communist first, a devout Christian second, a leader of historic greatness third, and a cheeseball actor a distant fourth.
It’s as if the screenwriter was getting paid per reference to Jesus. Reagan is more Christian than the Pope in Reagan. Every five or ten minutes, JC gets a shout-out. Reagan never lets us forget that it’s a Christian movie about a man who only pretended to be a lightweight to trick his adversaries into underestimating him.
Reagan is everything to everyone here. He’s a man’s man. He’s a lady’s man. He’s a hunk and a half, and though it is never explicitly established, you know from the way that he carries himself that he’s got a massive dong. You don’t take on Communism in all its forms unless you’re packing downstairs.
Reagan seems a little ashamed that a figure as Christ-like in his divine wisdom and selfless service to humanity ever indulged in anything as silly and superficial as moviemaking.
In Reagan, the superhuman subject single-handedly defeats Communism in Hollywood before turning his attention to worldwide Communism, which he also beats more or less by himself. Reagan stops just short of including heroic shots of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn holding bald eagles while American flags flutter majestically behind them.
Leave it to the Christian-Conservative Entertainment Complex to depict an enduring source of shame as more proof of our country’s greatness.
Reagan spent long years on a shelf after filming finished in 2021. It should have remained on a shelf forever. It might have received a pity theatrical release, but quality-wise, it’s unreleasable.
I’ve only given out Zero stars twice. The first was for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. The second is for Reagan. That seems fitting. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey at least knows that it’s morally reprehensible. This hogwash, in sharp contrast, has deluded itself into thinking that it is righteous when it’s really repugnant.
Zero Stars out of five
Dennis Quaid is that rare person who actually got worse once they became sober.
The amount of Jesus references in this movie reminds me of how CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) was defined back in the day by the number of JPMs (Jesuses Per Minute). I wonder if that's the case with Christian movies now.