Grade: C
If Swing Vote was a person, he would be your typical collegiate student spewing out political cynicism on the quad, pretending to sound intelligent while offering nothing original. If only big names could save this drowning campaign, but they don't. Bland performances can't.
Some political comedies fail because they're not funny and they try to achieve too much. This political comedy fail because well, it's not funny and they don't really try to achieve anything at all. Bud Johnson, the all-American loser from Texas, gets a chance to have his vote really be counted for something. And predictably, the two presidential candidates sacrifice their opinions, values, and morals to win. By the end, we have a multitude of Full House realizations. The only thing missing was a Beach Boys cameo. It's okay though, Willie Nelson came through.
In my humble opinion, cynicism is almost never useful or proactive, just an immature, unsophisticalted, and lazy method to filter thoughts. But cynicism reigns king in this film, as their voice of God comes from Mr. Johnson's young daughter, Molly (fitting). Meanwhile, the adults play naive voters who are easily convinced by a politician's tricks.
At its essence, Swing Vote screams for a third political party that can relate to a common man's troubles. So if that was the point Kevin Costner and writer/director Joshua Michael Stern was trying to make, it's a conclusion/solution that's overwhelmingly archaic and simple in this year's political yarn. And if they weren't trying to make a point, just wanting to entertain in the midst of 20-plus debates this year, they didn't do a very good job of that either.
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