This is a fantastic marketing scheme that all extremely crappy movies should mimic. It’s not that audiences were not interested in partaking in something called “Morbin’ time”; it’s that an international cabal of elites intentionally kept Morbin’ time from you so that you could not have it. That way if your movie fails, you can blame it on a worldwide conspiracy, salvaging some fraction of your career.
Unfortunately, at the time of this review the drunken squirrels handling the movie’s marketing over at Breitbart News And Tactical Gun Safe Emporium had not offered us an advance copy, so we’re going to have to do the whole movie review just from what we can see in the trailer.
More fortunately, it’s clear that the research that went into developing this particular flick flipped frequently between obsessive-compulsive ferreting out minor details, and the exact opposite of that. A good demonstration would be the film’s IMDB page, which at the time of this writing notes actress Jovana Stevic’s role only as “Beau Wife.”
This is, we choose to presume, because nobody marketing this lavish production at any point bothered to Google the name of Beau Biden’s once-wife. The script may have gotten to that exact point, to the point of Googling “name of beau wife,” before veering off into a new pile of cocaine. Some of these things are hard. An entire movement has combed over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, or five laptops, or transforming monster truck made entirely of laptops, but “what is name beau wife” was one laptop too far.
But this saves us some time, because it shows us how accurate we have to be in our own review and the answer is mostly a sluggish meh. Whatever sounds good is what we should go with, don’t sweat the details, and apostrophes are for try-hards. This is what Andrew Breitbart would have personally wanted, back before the company was pried from his corpse and turned into Steve Bannon’s vehicle for promoting white supremacists and tiki-torch fascism..
If we don’t need to concern ourselves with the details, then we don’t even need to see the movie to review it. We can just Rudy Giuliani our way through this whole entire thing, caution to the wind, libel laws but a speck on the horizon. Here are my own major objections to the Robert Davi-directed work:
• The movie completely lost me when Hunter Biden darkly informed his father that “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” This is terrible writing. This isn’t even writing: This is the scribbled notes on a draft that hasn’t been written yet, the hand-waving between plot points fought over by roomfuls of writers before the first line of dialogue ever gets written. You’re telling me that you’ve got an unlimited budget, the backing of the most powerful rodent mascot in Hollywood (not Steve Bannon, the other one), and your major driving plot point is that “somehow” the villain that already got his ass handed to him before most of the current audience was ever born got himself resurrected into this new movie because, what, your New Villain Design Team blew their entire budget on imported anime figurines?
• I didn’t like the part where Hunter Biden meets The King Of All Cocaine and it turns out to be, of course, Rudy Giuliani. The audience can’t help but see this supposed plot twist a mile off. Giuliani’s longwinded message to Hunter, a Karate Kid-styled teaching moment in which the Giuliani-voiced CGI-animated sack of sentient blow tells Hunter that it is not enough to believe in cocaine, you must become one with cocaine, was overdrawn; following it up with a dance number was too much.
I guess those are the major points. Everything else we have to do the hard way, by watching the trailer. Are you ready? Here we go.
The first thing we have to note is that this movie is dark. I don’t mean the subject matter: I mean the entire thing appears to have been lit with a single incandescent bulb. Just the one, for every scene. I don’t know what the budget was, but perhaps if conservatives weren’t so dead-set against modern technology they could have switched to a much brighter LED-based bulb and at least given the audience a bit of context as to which dark rooms these characters were emoting their way through.
Is Hunter supposed to be a vampire? Does the light burn his undead skin? Are we in an alternate universe, an Earth-B, devastated by nuclear winter, a place where crops are unable to grow and even the midday sun wheezes across the sky like an asthmatic and broken demigod? No? Then turn some damn lights on, you cheap hacks.
If Hunter is supposed to be a vampire, the teaser doesn’t let on. But in movie advertising it seems evident that director Davi did not come onto this project with a full understanding of his subject matter. To wit: a sunglasses-wearing, cigarette-dangling Hunter Biden that appears to be based in very large part on pop culture caricatures of Hunter S. Thompson.
Hunter S. Thompson and Hunter Biden are not the same Hunter. These are two different enemies of all things conservative, both known for drugs and possibly-made-up conspiracies, but not actually the same person or even close to it. What is the purpose of conflating these particular two? This may be conservative symbolism of the sort that we denizens of Earth Prime, or Amazon Prime, or Optimus Prime With Free Shipping or wherever the hell universe we are in, simply cannot understand.
But the end result is to make the drug-addled, stripper-addicted main character look cool, which is probably not the intent the creators set out with. Or maybe it was; we will never know.
That brings us to the main point of review. This movie, the first of the Breitbart name, is quite transparently a porno. It is soft porn, albeit very soft porn, but from premise to execution to marketing to trailer, “Canceled Conservatives Make A Softcore Porno” remains the far more accurate movie title than the one they slapped on in an attempt to put some politics on this thing.
This is a movie about a one-dimensional main character careening through scene after scene of women in their underwear. This is a movie about bras. This movie may be the closest any Proud Boy comes to ever seeing an almost-naked breast; it is porn for incels who, for whatever reason, cannot access or abide regular porn but can get away with watching this. It may be a fetish thing, in which America’s most compulsive patriots simply cannot get an erection unless their pornography’s plot revolves mainly around how their ideological enemies, who are very cool and have sunglasses and access to all the drugs and all the strippers, suck.
The news that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter has struggled with drug addiction and other bad life choices is not new, and there is not much that can make it new. It is also not particularly titillating. Powerful political families commonly have embarrassing members whose mere mention evokes scandal. There is always an offshoot family member known for hard drinking, or for promoting crank anti-vaccine hoaxes, or for cocaine use and/or screwing up his cushy military pilot job, or for cheating his father and family out of whatever wealth can be squeezed out so he can lose the money and claim it was everyone else’s fault.
This is not unusual, and is only partisan in that Democrats try to sweep these people under the rug, and conservatives elect them to office.
The people behind My Son Hunter were therefore tasked with trying to find a way to make “adult relative of political figure makes a complete mess of himself” into something that would actually be compelling enough for their target audience to spend money on, and that’s why we got soft porn.
The film is “told through the eyes of a 25-year-old left-wing activist, who is working as a stripper to pay for her college loan,” director Davi told (checks notes) Rudy Giuliani’s podcast. So the very premise of the film is, apparently, lifted from old Hustler fan mail. We’ve got a lot of boxes to check, from “left-wing activist” to “stripper” to “college loan,” and if you’re a Proud Boy I can imagine it would be difficult to even get to the end of that sentence before reaching climax. It has everything.
If you are trying to convince your audience that Joe Biden is the pinnacle of modern political evil, you have two choices. You can scream that he likes Amtrak too much, or you can suggest that he is the willing pawn of a no-good offspring who is the closet mastermind of All The Conspiracies, something something China, something something Ukraine. But no matter which path you take it’s already clear that not even diehard conservatives are watching an hour of that drivel unless it is told through the eyes of a left-wing activist stripper trying to pay off her ivory tower debts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if every new conservative movie that comes out in the next decade is “told through the eyes” of a left-wing activist stripper just trying to pay off her loans. How could you not run with a premise like that? What if Vince Foster, but told through the eyes of a very attractive left-wing activist stripper. What if Robert Mueller, but from the point of view of a very attractive left-wing activist stripper.
What if it wasn’t the FBI that seized confidential, secret, and top secret government security documents from Mar-a-Lago after the government was unable to explain to the dough-brained golf cheat hoarding them that he could not just make off with national secrets as keepsakes. What if the FBI raid was actually carried out by a secret government team of very attractive left-wing activist strippers, and that is why “they” are hiding the security camera footage of the search.
The movie leans heavily on producing patriotic erections, both in the trailer and in the rest of its advertising. The Twitter account’s pinned title picture is of our presumed Hunter, who looks suspiciously like Eric Trump, nuzzling the breast of one of three lingerie-clad woman as another, who looks suspiciously like Melania Trump, takes a picture of the scene. This is the selling image of the movie, not any supposed political intrigue. Not Joe Biden. Not China. That.
Why does one of the strippers look like Melania? Why is Hunter cast to look weirdly like Don Jr. and/or Eric? The Trump family is the epitome of all class and beauty, so that’s why the casting department looked to them for inspiration. Why does an unnamed bearded man with a thickish accent get subtitles, as if it would take a mastermind to interpret his American English dialog without somebody writing it all down? Because this movie is a fetish. It does not cater to fetishes: It is a fetish. Somebody turned on a single 40-watt bulb and filmed the inner workings of the conservative mind: all women are either strippers, evil, or Gina Carano. Texas Republicans may have already written that into their party platform.
Anyway, Hunter Biden is doing coke and touching breasts and, a few fleeting clips later, President Joe Biden wants his “cut.” His cut of what? How did we get here? It doesn’t matter! The premise is that Hunter Biden is a ne’er-do-well coke fiend who simultaneously has been tasked with growing the fortune of his corrupt and dimwitted father because, uh, reasons! Everybody needs to be offended right now!
Look at him, all bug-eyed and sweaty after grifting his way through life on nothing but his access to crooked ol’ dad. Hunter Biden is a jerk.
This is the problem with the movie, one that very few people will watch because most people do not like mixing their porn with their politics and it is very weird that certain people do. The central premise, other than here-are-some-strippers, is that Joe Biden is a mastermind of corruption, one of the most corrupt individuals to ever inhabit the office a coup-plotting seditionist traitor just relinquished. And Joe Biden’s corruption requires tasking a complete f*ck-up of a son with bringing in billions of dollars of crooked money without somehow screwing it up.
The advice is “write what you know.” It is absolutely unremarkable that conservatism would find such a plot entirely believable, in the same way that it is unremarkable that the party of Matt Gaetz started going on about groomers.
I realize that to conservatives, basing entire international conspiracies around coke-headed dimwit offspring who’ve never worked a real job in their lives sounds absolutely plausible, but not every family can operate that way. It is a niche. A rarity, even—just one particular lifestyle choice out of many. Often, corrupt families choose to have their corrupt schemes carried out by people who have two, even three brain cells to rub together rather than entrusting them to the family coke-heads.
The unfortunate truth is that this movie will not see much success. The target market of people who want to both believe Joe Biden is the center of all evil, and can only focus on that premise if it is told from the viewpoint of a left-wing stripper just trying to make ends meet is small. Very small. And a great many of them are currently sitting in jail after trying to overturn a United States election using nothing but thrown fire extinguishers, weaponized flagpoles, and the contents of Rudy Giuliani’s head.
If you want to stream the movie directly to Washington, D.C.,-area jail cells, sure. Those people would probably kill for a few frames of scantily clad breast at this point. To everyone else, though, it is a premise much akin to “What if Winnie The Pooh was a serial killer.” Uh, sure? Sure, you can go with that. You can make a whole movie about it, if you want, and nobody will stop you. You can borrow the 40-watt bulb used for this production to light that one, it might even still have some life left in it.
But it’s a niche product, and there’s not much that can be done about that.
Perhaps Hunter Biden could have had more scenes in which he announced that it was, at long last, Morbin’ Time? Perhaps Hunter Biden could turn out to be not just a vampire, but Winnie The Pooh’s alter ego—a Jekyll and Hyde scenario, one in which Piglet is reimagined as a left-wing activist stripper with a heart of gold but college loans to pay off? Perhaps Joe Biden could growl softly, to Secret Service Agent Gina Carano, that “somehow” Leonid Brezhnev has returned. Then this thing could turn into a buddy cop movie, with Hunter Biden and Piglet trying to close a billion-dollar Chinese deal to capture the reanimated Brezhnev before Ukrainian wheat farmers find him first and tow him off to be repainted in Ukraine’s colors. I don’t know, don’t care.
None of us really care, and that is the problem with movies premised on conspiracies and “what if every crooked thing our political heroes have done were actually done by the people those heroes told us to hate.” The audience is both built-in and ungrowable. Russian media figures are apparently gleeful in their hope that this bit of rote demagoguery is really going to stick it to Joe Biden, allowing “our beloved Trump” to be wheeled back into the White House from his likely-at-this-point prison cell.
But Russia is not as skilled at reading the American mind as they like to believe. They think we have more of an attention span than we do. They think our minds can be changed, when the plainer truth is that the same people cling to the same partisan conspiracies forever. The people who were racist 40 years ago are still racist now, just the terminology has changed. For example, they still want to end federal education programs because of desegregation, except with newly added transphobia. The audience is the audience. If you didn’t like hearing about Donald Trump’s weird offspring boosting Chinese real estate deals with nods to daddy’s new ability to tweak immigration rules, then sure, you’re going to love hearing about some vaguely similar scheme in which the names have all been changed and suddenly it’s now something worthy of outrage. But that’s the only audience for such things, and not a lot of those people have spending money.
Worse, it is getting hard to compete with real life at this point. The current news cycle features a photograph of secret and top secret documents, or at least their designating cover sheets, laid out on a tacky carpet with an evidence tag, displayed in a court filing that explains the documents were found in Donald Trump’s private office, inside a box, in a search conducted after federal officials came to believe that Trump and his lawyers were intentionally hiding those documents from the government for unknown reasons.
But look! Joe Biden’s messed-up son did cocaine! Everybody look at that instead!
That mob needs their feel-good movies too. The same voices that promote violence-provoking hoaxes with reckless abandon—like far-right propaganda hacks Andy Ngo and Jack Posobiec—will of course all agree that it is Joe Biden who is the crooked one after patriotically viewing the soft porn trailer.
They won’t actually pay to see the movie, mind you. The movie’s hoped-for audience doesn’t have the attention span to actually watch a whole damn film of this stuff. They’ll watch the trailer, just like we did, and maybe they’ll wonder what the hell was going on between Hunter Biden and Palpatine, and they’ll share Sean Hannity’s outrage tweets that it’s “THE STORY YOU WEREN’T ALLOWED TO SEE.” And that, for all but a handful of them, will be all.
If we’re not allowed to see it, why is Hannity bragging that 3.5 million people have viewed the trailer? Why is it getting free-as-dirt publicity from the biggest, most swollen heads of the Fox News empire? We’re even helping advertise it!
But sure, it’s all a conspiracy. Everyone’s in on it. It’s not talent that will push this movie to success or failure, or a near-complete inability to turn on a light bulb here and there; it’s a battle between globalists who want to oppress the political soft porn markets and patriots who are themselves so bored of their own conspiracies that they can only stomach them if you show them from the point of view of left-wing activist strippers who find themselves at the center of it all.
Go nuts with that. Oh, also the politician you wanted to overthrow American democracy was just caught hoarding hundreds—I repeat, hundreds—of national security papers in his spy-riddled “de Rothschild”-hosting private club even after deaths at the U.S. Capitol failed to keep him in power. That sounds like some pretty good blockbuster fodder right there; if only there was some way to combine it with a few good-for-nothing sons, some comically sketchy foreign business dealings, grotesque sexual predation, and a main character who looks like a tumeric-dipped human foot.
Now that sounds like a movie. I probably wouldn’t watch that one either, but I’d sit through the trailer. Well, most of it. Probably.
