See It or Skip It: Swing Vote

Swing Vote is like that one annoying friend who always needs rides to the airport or wants to borrow money. It doesn’t know when to stop asking for favors from the audience, requiring you to suspend your disbelief for two exhaustively long hours and try to believe that an American presidential election could be decided by one vote. Oooookay. The film is all glossy Americana, all the time, even trying to give a trailer park the Michael Bay treatment, making it look sexy, golden and wind blown.

Kevin Costner stars as Bud, probably after the beer he enjoys drinking so much, a down on his luck single father trying to make ends meet in small town Texico, New Mexico. His daughter is played by Madeline Carroll, a 12-year-old who must've graduated from the Dakota Fanning School of Acting. Carroll has the kind of calculated precociousness that only exists in movie children.

Costner’s star was dulled considerably since his Bull Durham-Field of Dreams days and the heft of this implausible, uninspired script is too great for him to bear. Even with a supporting cast filled out with the comic talents of Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez and Nathan Lane, the film falls hard and flat.

Swing Vote is profoundly cheesy and we’re not talking Jarlsberg or Gouda, we mean Velveeta. Gooey, cloying, nasty after-tasting cheese.

The plot is so riddled with holes it’s almost laughable, but the film never gets past it’s major conceit: that ONE vote can mean the world. In an election year, we don’t need anymore rhetoric.

Rather than waste your time and money seeing this dreck, spend it on something like Stealing America Vote by Vote, a documentary about the criminal mishandling of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio where hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised, made to wait up to 12 hours at polling places and had votes switched by computerized machines.

Swing Vote is one note. One boring, tedious, awful note that the entire cast will have to live down for years to come.

Skip it…we wish we had.