Reagan – An Overambitious Puff Piece Biopic

Reagan is a biopic that covers the life of the 40^th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Told through the voice of former KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight), whose life becomes inextricably linked with Reagan (Quaid), when he first caught the Soviets’ attention as an actor in Hollywood. From the glitter of Hollywood to the world stage, Reagan overcomes the odds to become the 40^th president of the United States. In the weeks leading up to the release of Reagan, all signs were pointing towards this being a lackluster biopic that didn’t need to be made, at least by those involved with it. While not a trainwreck, it certainly has some redeeming qualities about it. However, it is far from the fascinating and informative biopic it could have been.

Quaid is a great actor who has turned in countless terrific performances, playing a ton of memorable characters over the years. He’s an inspired pick for the role of Reagan, and while he is far from bad here, he feels woefully miscast and very out of his element. Every single second Quaid is one screen, it feels like he’s doing a Reagan impression. Though it can be amusing to watch, it feels extremely silly that many will find themselves laughing at his performance rather than be impacted by it. In a sense, Quaid is the most entertaining part of the film, but whether it be a lack of direction or just the choices he made in the role, it doesn’t do him any favours. In terms of the rest of the cast, they are mostly fine with many being underused and buried under laughable makeup and prosthetics.

The rest of the film is just a formulaic and standard biopic that suffers from fundamental errors that it could never quite recover from. Making the biggest mistake a biopic can do, it tries to cover every single detail of Reagan’s life from his early childhood, all the way to his final years. As a result, several key plot points and crucial moments in Reagan’s life worthy of their own movie feel rushed and glossed over. Not to say that’s the same thing audiences are saying about other films these days, but this film should have been a miniseries because it tries to cover far too much and even with a runtime of nearly two and a half hours, it essentially comes off as a glorified adaptation of a Wikipedia page. Meanwhile, it is also oddly structured with scenes of a hammy Russian Jon Voight narrating and having conversations about Reagan throughout. Those scenes do nothing but pull audiences out of the story and feel unneeded or better served in a completely different film despite of Voight’s surprisingly decent performance as Petrovich, silly accent included.

That being said, it’s never fun picking on any film for its clear budgetary restraints, but this film needed a way bigger budget to support all the ground it attempts to cover as it unfortunately feels pretty cheap as a whole. Reagan feels like a made-for-tv or Lifetime channel movie that just so happened to boast a solid cast from the editing to the lighting, directing, writing, and musical score. Like Quaid’s performance, a lot of it is just hard to take seriously because of its execution, and it feels a little odd and merely a puff piece that this paints Reagan as an infallible hero and fails to dive into any of the faults or criticisms he’s received over his tenure as President which makes the film feel like an inauthentic biopic.

In the end, Reagan is the kind of film that will please a certain type of audience but if one is not part of that audience, this will likely do very little and is best to just skip altogether. While slightly better and a little more watchable than what many may have expected based on the pre-release chatter surrounding it, it is still basically what you one would expect it to be, in the worst ways.

still courtesy of Sherry Media Group

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Connor Carey

www.connorsmoviereviews.com/