I stand by that title. Reagan (2024) is an astonishingly incompetent and cynical attempt to pass off pseudo-religious myth as history. Written by Howard Klausner (Space Cowboys) based on the book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism by Paul Kengor, this film is, sneakily, more than an act of political propaganda, it is a piece of anti-SAG-AFTRA (The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and WGA (The Writers Guild of America) propaganda from Lionsgate. Disguised as an election year box office play, this film is revenge for the Writer’s Guild and Screen Actor’s strikes of 2023.
L-R: Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan in REGAN. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate. © 2024 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
“He was working with the Soviets trying to infiltrate Hollywood through the Unions.”
While the film may climax in Denis Quaid (The Substance; The Parent Trap (1998)) shrilly yelling at TV cameras to tear down that wall, its misshapen narration device (which it abandons 45 minutes in), centers on the near-assassination of President Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton Hotel. As the bullet hits Reagan, he flashes back to his past as an actor in post-war Hollywood. The entire first act of the film is dedicated to praising McCarthyism and the Red Scare. An era where, lying through his teeth, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy attempted to raise his own national profile by claiming to have a secret list of Communist sympathizers working inside the government. Failing to secure any meaningful convictions in his televised hearings, MCarthy moved on to Hollywood where he asked Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan, along with other conservative actors like the war-dodging John Wayne (The Searchers; Rio Bravo) and studio heads like Walt Disney (Snow White; Steamboat Willie) to give him a list of names. The names produced, “The Hollywood Ten” and others (Dalton Trumbo (Roman Holiday; The Brave One), Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Collins, Howard Koch, Robert Rose, Waldo Salt, Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel, and Larry Parks), were blacklisted in Hollywood, and accused on national television of working on behalf of a foreign government to plant propaganda in Hollywood films. This is, of course, a simplified version of events, but hundreds of times more complex than the events as they play out in Reagan.
L: Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan in REGAN. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate. © 2024 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
What HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) left out of its accusations was that many of the pro-Soviet films that these artists had produced were on behalf of the U.S. Government as part of its U.S.-propaganda efforts to convince the American public to accept its new allies against the Nazis. And those who had joined the American chapters of Communist or Socialist parties had done so after this collaborative effort. The events of the Hollywood blacklist and Reagan’s time as president of SAG are complicated and important, but instead of delving into all of this, the film yadda-yaddas its way into showing that all Regan did was lead the political effort to end “Black Friday,” a separate but connected inter-union conflict that boiled into violence when strikebreakers tried to break through the picket line of Herb Sorrell’s Conference of Studio Unions. The bedrock of the film, what it is essentially about, is how Ronald Reagan saved Hollywood from the Communists who wanted to unite all of the Hollywood unions into one organizing group, and that prepared him to stop the Soviet Union in the exact same way. No piece of Hollywood studio filmmaking has ever assumed you are this dumb before.
Today, all of the studios are allowed to organize as one group, the AMPTP (The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), and the unions all have to negotiate deals on their own. This is a consequence of Reagan’s tenure as President of the Screen Actors guild, and one of his great failures, but not a mistake. While he failed his union and acting as a profession, he very much did it successfully and purposefully. And Reagan and Lionsgate worship him for it.
The Hollywood Blacklist is one of the most shameful moments in American politics, free speech, and art. If you’d like to learn more about it, I highly recommend Korina Longworth’s Podcast You Must Remember This, and its archive of Blacklist episodes.
L-R: Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan and Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan in REGAN. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate. © 2024 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This yadda-yadda-ing of Reagan’s history is at the center of the film’s uncanny incompetency. While the consequences of Reagan’s actions are often brushed over in the popular memory, the film is so dedicated to giving every important moment a brief mention that it races through story after story, starting and ending conflicts inside of three minutes. It makes it difficult to follow what the film is saying at any moment. The film introduces two more framing devices. Alex Sparrow (The Big Trip; Vatican Tapes) plays a young Russian politician trying to learn more about how the Soviet Union collapsed. President Reagan also narrates to us from the future in another narrative track. It suggests multiple times that his election was an act of divine intervention. It turns massive moments into single scenes and complex characters into flat ideas. But this is by design, because by removing all context, nuance, and truth from historical events, director Sean McNamara is able to insert propagandistic, untrue, and worshipful versions of events into the memories of his audience. Successfully incompetent. What a tragic fall from grace for the director of Casper meets Wendy (1998) and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (1998).
“Is there anything worse than an actor with a cause?”
This is all made worse by the fact that Denis Quaid’s performance as Ronald Reagan is terrible. It is nearly inconceivable that the same man who is so in control of his instrument in The Substance (2024) is the same man who squeaks his voice and moves his mouth to one side in a poor attempt at imitating a man everyone already thinks he looks like. His accent is inconsistent, and there is no interiority to the performance. Even the moment when he has the most complexity to play, where Reagan stumbles in debate prep, Quaid cuts it off as plain frustration in his performance. Meanwhile, the film turns it into a moment where the Ivy League snobs just needed to “let Ronnie be Ronnie.” A moment where the film could have alluded to the Biden-like conspiracy to cover up Reagan’s Alzheimer’s while in office is instead changed into a culture war hoorah. The film will later blatantly lie about when Reagan began to struggle with Alzheimer’s, just as he lied about it to us.
The Wizards of Waverly Place’s (2007-2012) David Henrie is also very bad as a young Reagan, who he plays as both a high schooler and young adult, neither with conviction. Penelope Ann Miller (Flipped; The Artist) plays a cardboard cutout of a woman in Nancy Reagan. One of the film’s greatest feats is its discovery of new ways to demean Nancy Reagan, given that Twitter users have already redefined her legacy as “the throat goat,” and she had already demeaned her own legacy when she disowned her daughter for living with a boyfriend outside of marriage. Half the time Alex Sparrow’s Russian accent sounds more like he’s trying to do Antonio Banderas in Spy Kids (2001).
These are not the film’s only failures. The color grading is uneven, as you can see in the conflicting blues of the drape between two different camera angles in the brief Goldwater speech sequence. In one sequence where Rev. George Otis (Pat Boone) prophesied that Reagan would be president one day, Otis and Pat Boone (Chris Massoglia) are identified by on-screen titles, but Jerry Falwell Sr. (uncredited), next to them, is not, because this film is nothing but sloppy and inconsistent in its technical practices, consideration of historical importance, and even which political stances it thinks it can declare and which it can hedge. The film glorifies sending the National Guard against peaceful protestors. The film turns several moments of Reagan being a scab or supporting scabs into moments of heroism. Every shot of the film looks faker than a Hallmark movie, even when the blocking is composed well. The VFX team seems to have spent all of its time applying a smoothing filter to Dennis Quaid’s face in multiple sequences, creating the worst de-aging of an actor in a studio film yet. The man looks like they opened photoshop and ran the smudge tool all over his face, then rubbed the screen down with Vaseline every time the camera cut to him. Even when Reagan manages to make a salient point, it does so accidentally. In one sequence where it laments that Reagan’s late-stage acting career went poorly “because the war cost him his youth”, the film instead gives cinematic insight into why failing actors like Zachary Levi (Shazam; Chuck) often flip to a right-wing political grift when they can’t cut it on the screen anymore, implying that Reagan just did it better than anyone else.
“Doesn’t matter if I believe it. Did he believe it? Who knows.”
Today, half the country will go to the polls to vote for a man who has been called our greatest bullshit artist. But that’s not true. That title belongs to Ronald Reagan. He lied to the American people by saying he would improve their lives while he transferred generations of wealth to the ultrarich, promising that it would “trickle down.” It never did, and it was never supposed to. Reagan took credit for ending the Cold War, but as the film admits itself in Act 2, the Soviet Union was always destined to fail because fascism (even when disguised as Socialism) cannot manage money well enough to compete with another super power of any political system. Reagan lied about his Alzheimer’s, allowing his wife and staff to run the country in his name, walked away from one of the only chances at nuclear disarmament in history (which the film paints as his great achievement!), and he inspired a truly terrible, incompetent movie that managed to make $30 million at the box office. President Ronald Reagan was a scab, a liar, and a middling actor with terrible career instincts.
Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan in REGAN. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate. © 2024 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The only thing that Reagan did right as president was withhold funds from Israel when they started killing children again in 1981. And neither candidate running today is willing to do that. Happy Election Day America.
In theaters August 30th, 2024.
Available on digital October 15th, 2024.
Available on VOD November 1st, 2024.
Available on Blu-ray and DVD November 19th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Reagan website.
Final Score: ½ out of 5
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Categories: Home Video, Reviews, streaming
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