W is woefully weak

The Movie House - I walked into Oliver Stone's latest film W, a biopic pertaining the life and times of America's worst president, with an odd mix of skepticism and excitement.

Stone is a capable filmmaker as he has demonstrated in the past with Platoon, The Doors, JFK, and Natural Born Killers.

However, Stone has fallen upon rather hard times as his last film Alexander demonstrated. It was overlong, unexciting and just plain boring.

W follows the exact same pattern. It's way too long and at times impossible to watch.

The film opens with George W. as a drunken frat boy, flirting with any woman who comes within ten feet of him. We then see his inability to keep any sort of steady job going due to his complete lack of interest. He wants to get a job in baseball.

This brings about the ire of George Bush senior who informs George, "You're a Bush. Now act like one!"

One of the central motives for George is his never-ending quest to earn his father's love and approval.

The movie is basically George's quest to do just that and the film follows his journey through his stint with alcoholism, meeting the future Laura Bush, his governorship attempt in Texas, and his eventually presidency and decision to invade Iraq.

Now all this might sound pretty good on paper but Stone makes many an error in his presentation of W.

In his desperate attempt to include all aspects of George's life (right down to the incident where he was nearly killed by choking on a pretzel) Stone leaves out what I felt was the most critical one, Sept. 11.

I was very interested to see what Stone's take on what Bush was doing on that day would be, but sadly, it is nowhere to be found.

Stone also dwells far too long on Bush's 'ascension' into Christianity. All these scenes of George praying and having conversations with a priest are part of what makes George tick no doubt.

I just felt that there were too many of them and they only pad the already bloated running time.

I could keep going but I want to talk some of the movies positive aspects, like Josh Brolin as George W. Bush for example.

Brolin may not look identical to W but he certainly has his voice and mannerisms down to a tee. He is simply fantastic to watch. I believe an Oscar nomination is certainly in the works.

I also enjoyed the scenes that take the viewer behind closed doors and into the discussions held in the oval office and the war room. They are fictionalized of course, but I still found them engaging.

In particular is the sequence where the invasion of Iraq is discussed and George is not paying attention to a single word.

By the film's end I think we are supposed to feel bad for ol' George and look at him as just a misunderstood child who never grew up and got very lucky.

I didn't really see him that way. He was a nincompoop to me going in and he still is one after watching the movie.

In short, I'm glad I watched the movie but I won't see it again. I wish the movie could've been more informative and less of a bore. With that in mind I can't really recommend the movie to the average viewer.

2J's out of 4.