My Son Hunter

Poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted. This movie does not have a storyline it's just garbled nonsense. The plot (I'm being generous to call it that) is just the embodiment of every conspiratorial and bad faith argument by the far right wing. Even going into it with an open mind, I was disappointed in the first scene. There is nothing entertaining or informative or thought provoking about this film. It is just nonsense. It's clearly made to profit off of the hate and ignorance of its target audience with no care for anyone that's not deep into that political ideology. Don't waste time or money on this unless you're who they were trying to market this garbage to.

Politics aside this movie is a mess. Like what is it? Is it a documentary? If it is it's too over-laden with "comedy" that undercuts the message it's trying to convey. If it's just supposed to be a movie there's too many sections of just droning exposition for it to be entertaining. It'll do fine in it's echo chamber I noticed most of the positive reviews are from people 45 +, but it's not going to convince anybody else by being as compelling as watching comunity theater production of Frost/Nixon. Also nothing says America first than having the entire film being shot in Serbia and only using foreign labor because it's cheaper.

I wrote a full review where I relayed the full saga of the Hunter Biden Laptop non-troversy and provided a litany of links to all of my sources, which I posted on Letterbox. Sadly IMDB doesn't allow you to code hyperlinks, or link anything at all, which is essential if you're going to review a movie as dedicated to spreading real life misinformation as My Son Hunter. So, if you are interested in getting all of the context that lead up to this movie, you can find it on Letterboxd. But here is part of my review of the movie itself:

"Yeah, it's a bad, try-hard movie. An incompetent biopic hit-piece that fails to meaningfully hit its target. Hunter Biden is a rich kid who likes to party and coasted through life on cushy jobs he wasn't qualified for because of nepotism? *shocked Pikachu face*

Right out the gate this movie tries so hard set itself apart from the typically incompetently produced conservative exploitating fare, desperate to showcase that this is meant for a serious non-psychotic audience with its sleek cameras and JJ Abrams lens flairs, very quick to show you that they're not going to be restrained by any of the prudish Christian morality other conservative propaganda films are, as within the first eight minutes we see inside the den of a strip club's changing room while the dancers casually walk around in scanty outfits and we're given two full minutes of a beautiful dancer who calls herself "Kitty" alluring Hunter Biden with a dance, whom we're given a close up of snorting cocaine and loadly dropping an F-bomb before enjoying the show (all the while they're careful not to display any nudity), all of which I'm sure is going to be a shocking display of moral decay to the audience that is actually going to watch this, everything set to scream "THIS AINT YOUR GRANDMA'S RIGHT WING PROPAGANDA MOVIE!" It's cute just how hard they're trying, when they don't even have the imagination to visualize what a coked up stripper orgy would look like outside of some blurry camera filters (and once again, when we're given the aftermath of this stripper orgy when everybody has passed out on the floor, hilariously, absolutely nobody passed out at this coked up stripper orgy is naked, because as hard as they want this to be a mature movie for real adults they can't push the content far enough to offend and alienate too much of their target audience). It throws absolutely everything at the wall that the hip and edgy popular political comedies in the vein of Adam McKay does these days for "humor": A badly animated graphic of an anatomically correct heart beating faster and faster as Hunter snorts more and more cocaine (think Scott Pilgrim), some thought bubbles popping above Hunter and a random dog's head like conversation (think Shithouse), random picture/video montages of Hunter's licentious partying scattered about (think The Big Short), characters turning and speaking directly to the camera because it's meta and the kids these days go wild for anything that pretends to be self-aware (think The Big Short), actors who don't play any characters dumping exposition about how illegal activities are conducted (think The Big Short), a fake-out "gotcha" fictionalized happy ending (think Vice and the Big Short), awkwardly shoving memed to death lines real people have said into dialogue (think Don't Look Up, and yes, practically everything is incompetently lifted from Adam McKay movies, with a little bit of The Laundromat splashed in), etc."

After that point, I go over some of the specific claims this movie makes and discuss them, which I wish I could link, but you'll find it on Letterboxd.

The most offensive thing about this bad movie is how dull it is. If someone tells you this is a watchable film, it's either a bald-faced lie, sign of traumatic brain injury, a red flag to their conception of taste, or some combination of the three. It is honestly so plain to see that it's like listening to a child say they haven't eaten any cookies, who has chocolate and crumbs all over their mouth. It is incredibly hard to believe anyone's taste is this bad.

You know that thing that's the worst part of any movie, exposition? Well strap in, because the film is almost exclusively that. What isn't is either setting up the next bit of exposition, or title cards serving the same purpose.

Where did the budget go? While there are a few shots that show some kind of talent, it's balanced by things like dirt cheap effects (ie. The thought bubbles when Hunter has a concersation with a dog, the animated heart, etc). The fake news broadcasts shown honestly look like something straight from a Neil Breen film.

The directing decisions are poorly made. To demonstrate the thought and level of detail displayed, one early sequence shows Hunter with a rapidly beating heart, walking through a party where the thing that slows it down is smoking crack. Because cocaine is a downer, right? Later a phone call is made to a reporter who is typing on a typewriter, on his landline (no caller id), by someone he barely knows and says he'll text her later. It's a movie, whatever, but it's very lazy. Lazy enough to punctuate an obvious and lame joke with a boinging sound effect.

This movie thinks you're dumb. And if you're excited to spend $22 on this and rave about it later, it's right.

No matter your political leanings this is just embarrassingly godawful. Incompetent, shabbily-streamed, boring, etc. Etc. Poor Laurence is a pale shell of the actor he was in Inspector Lewis and the rest are clearly in it for the money.

If you're really curious, don't waste your hard-earned money on the actual movie. Rather, spend it instead on a one month $5 buck Patreon subscription to podcast QAnon Anonymous's hysterically funny blow by blow of this atrocity, to be found under the title "Premium Episode 184: My Son Hunter." There's a a good sample on Soundcloud.

You might enjoy their other "movie night" adventures, but this was truly one of their best.