REVIEW OF THE CAMPAIGN

About The Movie:

The Campaign (formerly
known as Dog Fight and Rivals) is a 2012 comedy film starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as two Southerners vying for a seat in Congress to represent their small district. The
screenplay for the film was written by Eastbound &
Down writer Shawn
Harwell and Chris Henchy, and is directed by Jay Roach.

Camden
"Cam" Brady (Will Ferrell) is the congressman of the 14th District of North Carolina and
is running for a fifth term unopposed. His campaign, coordinated by his old
friend, Mitch (Jason Sudeikis) is based on Cam's public image as a a
law-abiding Christian husband and father, which is undermined when Cam's affair
with a woman he met in one of rallies is exposed through a sexually explicit
voice message that Cam accidentally leaves in the answering machine of a local
family.

Corrupt businessmen Glen Motch (John Lithgow)
and Wade Motch (Dan Aykroyd) use this opportunity to convince Martin
"Marty" Huggins (Zack Galifianakis),
director of the tourism center of the town of Hammond and son of one of the
Motch Brothers' associates, Raymond Huggins (Brian Cox),
to run against Cam, as part of a plan to profit from illegal dealings with
Chinese companies. Marty announces that he is running against Cam, who
underestimates Marty and humiliates him by playing a video biography highlighting
Marty's dim-witted nature. The Motch Brothers then hire Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott)
to be Marty's campaign manager. Tim reinvents Marty as a successful entrepreneur
and family man, and the competition between Cam and Marty begins.

Marty popularity rises due to his
effective campaign, while Cam loses his after accidentally punching a baby
during a rally against Marty. Cam then ruins a campaign portraying Marty as a
terrorist and support of Al Qaeda, while Marty exposes Cam as a fake Christian. Cam's
attempts to display his religiousness by visiting a church of snake handlers
result in him getting bitten by a snake. The video is leaked into the Internet
and goes viral, restoring some of Cam's popularity.

Cam realizes he's setting a bad
example for his son, who is planning to slander his competition for class
president, and visits Marty hoping to make amends. A drunken Cam tells Marty
that he became a politician to help people, citing that as class president in
elementary school, he took a dangerous rusty slide out of the playground. After
he leaves, Marty is convinced by Wattley to report Cam to the police, and he is
pulled over and arrested for DUI, which takes a toll on his campaign. Marty
also portrays Cam as dim-witted by publishing a "communist manifesto"
that Cam had written in 2nd grade, and later showing a video of Cam's son
addressing Marty as "dad". Cam becomes furious, and fight breaks out
between the two, resulting in Cam punching a famous dog and once more suffering
in his popularity levels. Cam gets revenge on Marty by seducing Marty's
neglected wife, Mitzy (Sarah Baker) and releasing the sex tape, humiliating the
Huggins family, and in the process causing a disgusted Mitch to leave, while
Marty retaliates by shooting Cam's leg during a hunting trip and claiming to be
an accident.

As the election nears, Marty meets
with Raymond and the Motch Brothers, and learns of their plans to sell Hammond
to their Chinese business partner and turn the entire town into a large series
of factories. Marty realizes he was manipulated all along and rejects the Motch
Brothers' support, refusing to allow them to destroy Hammond. In order not to
lose their investment, the Motch Brothers attempt to sway Cam into helping them
by having Wattley revitalize Cam's public image, while Marty goes back to his
old self and reconciles with his estranged family.

On the election day, Cam's victory
appears to be certain, until Marty comes forward and exposes the Motch
Brothers' intent, promising to preserve Hammond if elected. Despite this, Cam
wins and remains congressman, due to the voting machines being owned by the
Motch Brothers. However, while gloating to Huggins, Huggins said he looked up
to Brady in school for getting rid of the slide, showing his large scars to
Brady. Realizing he has lost touch with his true objectives as a politician, he
withdraws from the election, and Marty wins by default. Cam earns back Mitch's
respect, and Marty appoints Cam as his chief of staff.

Six months later, Marty and Cam
carefully take down the Motch Brothers by exposing the scandals in which their
associates are involved, finally having the Motch Brothers called to appear
before the Congress for their shady dealings. Although the Motch Brothers are
able to use constitutional loopholes to have their business plans categorized
as "legal", they are arrested for providing assistance to Wattley,
who is actually a international fugitive known as "The Greek
Butcher". Marty and Cam celebrate their newfound friendship as the Motch
Brothers are carried away to jail.

 What Is Good About The Movie:

The Campaign is such
a tasty, hilarious treat. It's a bombs-away lampoon of the contemporary
political process, and damned if the movie isn't just funny but smart.
It's every inch a Will Ferrell comedy. But The Campaign is
also comparable, in ambition and perception, to comedies like Wag the
Dog, Bulworth, and Idiocracy. The film was directed
not by Ferrell's usual collaborator, Adam McKay, but by Jay Roach, the Austin
Powers auteur who went on to make the very fine HBO political dramas Recount and Game
Change. And it's all about how politics in America has become a
money-drenched, media-mad hall of mirrors — not only corrupt but as prefab as
an infomercial. It's about how the whole thing is now a game of charades.

In The
Campaign, the candidates have no ideas, and nothing much going on beneath
their carefully crafted images, but their superficiality does serve a purpose —
they're idiots because they're puppets. Cam, with his red-and-blue-striped
ties, Rotary Club haircut, and stump speech consisting of canned slogans
("America, Jesus, freedom!") that he spews with stiff-armed,
market-tested rectitude, speaks not in coherent ideological thoughts but in
focus-grouped signifiers. "My father worked with his hands," he says,
the words delivered with bootstrap pride (that is, before he adds "as head
stylist for Vidal Sassoon"). He's a reactionary on autopilot (and a closet
horndog), and he thinks he's going into the election unopposed. But when he
gets ensnared by a sex scandal, the Motch brothers (John Lithgow and Dan
Aykroyd), a pair of conservative billionaires who are thinly veiled riffs on
the Koch brothers, decide to back a candidate of their own.

That's Marty, of course, the most
pliable man they can find — a tour guide who wears awesomely ugly cardigan
sweaters and speaks in the caressing Southern-wuss manner of Mister Rogers
crossed with the Church Lady. He's a husband and dad, but as emasculated as you
could imagine, and Galifianakis gives a performance that's over-the-top
ludicrous and also strangely sympathetic. Marty is given a ruthless campaign
manager (Dylan McDermott) who puts him through the ultimate makeover, and the
funny thing is how well it takes. Spouting canned "values" rhetoric,
he actually becomes a plausible candidate.

In its
ramped-up media-farce way, The Campaign leaves no satirical
stone unturned. There are terrific parodies of the mud-bath unreality of
negative advertising in the Super PAC era, plus great scandalous gags about
outsourcing and house servants. But perhaps the best thing about the film is
that it doesn't let those other players in the political
process off the hook: the voters. The sly upshot of The Campaign is
that American politics may now have achieved a level of fakery that's
ridiculous, but the most ridiculous thing about the fakery is that it works.


What Is Bad About The Movie:


I can't think of anything.


Overall Grade:


A