Name: Retro Film Review: My Fellow Americans (1996)
Item: My Fellow Americans
Rating: 30
Author: @drax

(source: tmdb.org)

George W. Bush being so universally despised outside USA has less to do with his character or policies and more with the widespread belief that his election to US Presidency represents something unnatural. Thanks to Hollywood in 1990s, most non -Americans believe that Republicans are children-eating evil monsters and that nobody, not even such a stupid people like Americans, would allow that criminal organisation to preside over them without some sinister plot behind it. Some Hollywood producers in 1990s, however, occasionally paid some attention to American constitutional and socio political realities, including the fact that the American electorate is more-or-less evenly split between two major parties. One of the rare examples of Hollywood abandoning one-sided view of US politics is My Fellow Americans, 1996 comedy directed by Peter Segal.

Russell O. Kramer (played by Jack Lemmon) and Matt Douglas (played by James Garner) are two men who could hardly find anything in common - the former is penny-pinching Republican, the latter is womanising Democrat. However, both used to be Presidents of USA before being booted out of the office after single term; now both of them, humiliated and depressed after electoral loss, struggle to find something that would keep them in public spotlight. Their paths would cross when new Republican administration, led by President William Haney (played by Dan Aykroyd), gets threatened by new corruption scandal. Haney's idea is to put the all blame on his predecessor Douglas. In the process, a murder occurs and both Kramer and Douglas happen to be witnesses. That makes them target of Colonel Paul Tanner (played by Everett McGill), vicious government assassin, and two men are forced to run for their lives and hide among common citizens. Having to run is just less of a problem than the fact that two men simply can't stand each other.

Just like many Hollywood comedies, My Fellow Americans is based on the intriguing concept that never lives to its potential. The plot provided nice opportunity for sharp satire of US politics; instead we got naive, sentimentalist vision closer to Frank Capra's 1930s populist comedies (and definitely out of sync with today's more cynical perception of American politicians). The film additionally suffers from weak humour, atrocious dialogues and tendency to hide those flaws with action scenes that seem unsuitable to this sort of film. On the other hand, it is really nice to see Hollywood showing some political impartiality for a change (by having Republican as Good Guy), and it is even nicer to see Jack Lemmon and James Garner doing effective impersonations of Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton. However, My Fellow Americans, although watchable, deserves the same fate that its protagonists experienced at the very beginning of the film. RATING: 3/10 (+)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on September 26th 2003)