PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/25/06)

Talk about a November surprise. After raising a ruckus at the Toronto Film Festival last month, the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagines the assassination of George W. Bush, hits American screens a week and a half before midterm elections. The quick release comes courtesy of Newmarket Films, the same studio that parlayed Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ into a $300 million blockbuster. And as with that hot-button picture, the controversy surrounding Death of a President turns out to be more interesting than the movie itself. While it's far from the terrorist-training video that right-wing watchdogs (many of whom haven't even seen the film) are accusing it of being, it's not a particularly enlightening exercise either.

Filmed as a Frontline-style documentary, Death of a President examines the events of October 19, 2007, the day that Bush was gunned down outside a Chicago hotel. The first half-hour of the movie retraces the president's steps from the moment he disembarked from Air Force One at O'Hare to his speech in front of various Windy City luminaries that evening. In interviews, various advisors and Secret Service agents (all of whom are, of course, fictional characters) attest to the anger they witnessed in Chicago, with hoards of anti-Bush protestors clogging the downtown streets. Still, none of them anticipated what would happen that night, when a sniper punched two bullets into Bush's chest as he was climbing into his limo to return to the airport. He was immediately rushed to the hospital, where he died early the next morning.

The rest of the film concerns itself with the hunt for Bush's assassin. Several men — including a well-known activist and an Iraq War veteran — are brought in for questioning, but the most promising suspect appears to be Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian immigrant who worked in the building across the street from the hotel. Not only does he have a military background, but he is known to have attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. Despite not having any hard evidence beyond a partial fingerprint found at the crime scene, investigators consider the case against Zikri to be a slam-dunk. Seven months later, a jury agrees with them and delivers a guilty verdict. Meanwhile, the Republican-led Congress uses the hysteria surrounding Bush's death to pass a new, more restrictive version of the Patriot Act and President Cheney (yes, those are the scariest words in the English language) contemplates opening up a new front in the War on Terror by attacking Syria.

Although Death of a President is, at its most basic level, a stunt, director Gabriel Range does seem interested in seriously exploring what the ramifications of this scenario might be. Weaving together repurposed news footage (Cheney's eulogy at Reagan's funeral, for example, becomes the speech he delivers over Bush's coffin) with staged sequences, the movie depicts a fictional future that at times feels chillingly real. At the same time, Range doesn't offer any special insights about what Bush's assassination would mean to this country and the world at large. He omits too many important details, including the response from the Democratic Party (although, it's possible that Range intended their silence to speak volumes) and how the president's murder affects our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also surprising that we never hear the name "Osama Bin Laden" uttered once during the entire film — assuming he's still alive in this alternate timeline, surely he would have recorded one of his famous videos proclaiming victory. The Zikri storyline is clumsily handled as well, particularly a contrived last-minute twist that suggests another man may have been the sniper after all. There's no question that Death of a President fulfills its objective as a conversation starter, but as a movie, it's sketchy at best.

—Ethan Alter