My Son Hunter

You can see from the plethora of 1 and 10 star reviews here how blindly polarized American society is today. If it doesn't conform to the biased news sources both left and right that demonize each other daily, then there is absolutely no moderate middle ground it seems. For those of you giving this 9-10 stars... give your head a shake. That's like putting it on par with The Godfather. For those giving it 1 star reviews, stop watching MSNBC for a second, chill out and try to enjoy the satire. Trump has been roasted constantly over the last 6 years to the point where it's supremely annoying. God forbid someone should do the same to the Bidens for once.

OK rant over, on to the merits and drawbacks of the movie. I will agree that it was overly political, but what can you expect coming from Breitbart. I found the monologues hand-feeding Hunter's misdeeds to the audience with Carrano and the other side characters annoying distractions that really draw you out of the main narrative and make it seem like more of a political hit job than a film. That's probably my biggest gripe, and there are way more creative ways to do this.

The script is laughable at times, but overall I think it pulls through as just around par. The production value was actually quite good, with some great cinematography. Probably one of the best parts of the film, but it's almost like putting lipstick on a pig due to the other failings.

Despite everything else, I really enjoyed Laurence Fox's performance and think he did an excellent job portraying the sleazy yet emotionally damaged addict. Seeing his acting in the trailer was what originally got me to watch this in the first place. The parts where he was recounting his brother Beau and their childhood were excellent. If the rest of the script was able to evoke emotion even close to that as opposed to those annoying asides, this could have been a much better movie. John James as Biden was pretty funny too. I'm glad they didn't throw low blows by making fun of the speech and memory problems.

Overall, I'd give it a 6.5. This is an average movie that is held up by Laurence Fox's great acting, momentary emotional parts of the script that really shine through, and solid production value.

It makes the hooker the voice of reason, strangely.

It breaks the fourth wall to explain things to the viewer. It's awkward. A good work of art dramatizes, it doesn't lecture. It's like they couldn't decide whether this is a documentary with a narrator or a dramatization.

The pacing is too slow

The main actor is great, I just wish he'd been given a better script and direction.

Feels like a college project, with big text and cartoonish thought bubbles. The style has no continuity.

They made Biden unbelievably lucid.

Dialogue is clunky and at times laughable.

Gina Carano detracted from the movie. Her smugness is just annoying.

It's a waste of time.

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.

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.

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.