My Son Hunter (2022)
1/10
A failure to mimic the smug yet informative attitude of The Big Short
12 September 2022
I wrote a full review where I relayed the full saga of the Hunter Biden Laptop non-troversy and provided a litany of links to all of my sources, which I posted on Letterbox. Sadly IMDB doesn't allow you to code hyperlinks, or link anything at all, which is essential if you're going to review a movie as dedicated to spreading real life misinformation as My Son Hunter. So, if you are interested in getting all of the context that lead up to this movie, you can find it on Letterboxd. But here is part of my review of the movie itself:

"Yeah, it's a bad, try-hard movie. An incompetent biopic hit-piece that fails to meaningfully hit its target. Hunter Biden is a rich kid who likes to party and coasted through life on cushy jobs he wasn't qualified for because of nepotism? *shocked Pikachu face*

Right out the gate this movie tries so hard set itself apart from the typically incompetently produced conservative exploitating fare, desperate to showcase that this is meant for a serious non-psychotic audience with its sleek cameras and JJ Abrams lens flairs, very quick to show you that they're not going to be restrained by any of the prudish Christian morality other conservative propaganda films are, as within the first eight minutes we see inside the den of a strip club's changing room while the dancers casually walk around in scanty outfits and we're given two full minutes of a beautiful dancer who calls herself "Kitty" alluring Hunter Biden with a dance, whom we're given a close up of snorting cocaine and loadly dropping an F-bomb before enjoying the show (all the while they're careful not to display any nudity), all of which I'm sure is going to be a shocking display of moral decay to the audience that is actually going to watch this, everything set to scream "THIS AINT YOUR GRANDMA'S RIGHT WING PROPAGANDA MOVIE!" It's cute just how hard they're trying, when they don't even have the imagination to visualize what a coked up stripper orgy would look like outside of some blurry camera filters (and once again, when we're given the aftermath of this stripper orgy when everybody has passed out on the floor, hilariously, absolutely nobody passed out at this coked up stripper orgy is naked, because as hard as they want this to be a mature movie for real adults they can't push the content far enough to offend and alienate too much of their target audience). It throws absolutely everything at the wall that the hip and edgy popular political comedies in the vein of Adam McKay does these days for "humor": A badly animated graphic of an anatomically correct heart beating faster and faster as Hunter snorts more and more cocaine (think Scott Pilgrim), some thought bubbles popping above Hunter and a random dog's head like conversation (think Shithouse), random picture/video montages of Hunter's licentious partying scattered about (think The Big Short), characters turning and speaking directly to the camera because it's meta and the kids these days go wild for anything that pretends to be self-aware (think The Big Short), actors who don't play any characters dumping exposition about how illegal activities are conducted (think The Big Short), a fake-out "gotcha" fictionalized happy ending (think Vice and the Big Short), awkwardly shoving memed to death lines real people have said into dialogue (think Don't Look Up, and yes, practically everything is incompetently lifted from Adam McKay movies, with a little bit of The Laundromat splashed in), etc."

After that point, I go over some of the specific claims this movie makes and discuss them, which I wish I could link, but you'll find it on Letterboxd.
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