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Swing Vote
EMAILPRINTTouchstone Pictures (Disney)
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 23 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy
Written by:
Joshua Michael Stern
Jason Richman
Directed by: Joshua Michael Stern
Release Date:
Theatrical: August 1, 2008
DVD: January 13, 2009
Running Time: minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for language
Starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez, Madeline Carroll, Paula Patton, Judge Reinhold, Willie Nelson, Mare Winningham, and Richard Petty
Swing Vote follows the story of Bud Johnson, an apathetic, beer-slinging, lovable loser, who is coasting through a life that has passed him by. The one bright spot is his precocious, over-achieving twelve-year-old daughter Molly. She takes care of both of them, until one mischievous moment on Election Day, when she accidentally sets off a chain of events which culminates in the election coming down to one vote... her dad's. (Touchstone Pictures)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
ReelViews James Berardinelli
Swing Vote marries mild satire with Capra-esque melodrama in a formula that works surprisingly well.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The movie is a genial comedy, but it has significant undertones. Like some of Frank Capra's pictures.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The film seems like a loose and uncredited updating of "The Great Man Votes," a more serious 1939 entry.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The thing is far too absurd and broadly played for its own good.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The mix of comedy and drama is winning; Costner couldn't be better, and the little girl is a find.
Read Full Review >Variety Justin Chang
Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
This reasonably entertaining movie falters by trying to be both a dark comedy and a sentimental treatise on family and country.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
This one may be soft and derivative. But the actors establish a groove and stay on-message.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
This light satire is unlikely to influence the forthcoming election, but Costner's in fine fettle.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
If the title hadn't already been taken by another equally strained recent comedy, the new Kevin Costner vehicle could have been dubbed "Idiocracy."
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
A good-ol'-boy civics lesson that's too scattered to achieve its predictable goals.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
This is a killer idea for a political satire, and screenwriters Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern come close to realizing its farcical potential.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
As in so many essentially childish movies, it's an actual child who's always the smartest pants in the room.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Laura Yao
The film's not nearly as idiotic as its trailer made it seem, because it's not really about voting, or politics.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Everyone, including the candidates, will recognize the importance of civic duty, leaving Swing Vote to end with swelling music and uplifting speechifying but on a completely unsatisfactory note.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Costner (who's also a producer) plays to his middle-aged strengths in a role that exaggerates male weaknesses.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The longer Swing Vote hangs around, the more engaging it becomes. It's twice as smart as you have any reason to expect but still only half as smart as you wish it were.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A mainstream, eager-to-please, relatively generic endeavor, not an auteurist showcase.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
This potentially sharp working-class fantasy proves strangely unsatisfying.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Swing Vote isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Hopelessly muddled film cries out for the firm hand of a dyed-in-the-wool cynic like Billy Wilder, who would have put some teeth in its jabs at amoral politicians and blindly ambitious journalists.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Swing Vote may muster a few easy laughs, but the film is no contender.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Paints a surprisingly sour portrait of nearly all its characters, so much so that even the final-reel redemption rings hollow and forced.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.1 (out of 10) based on 23 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
James H gave it a4:
Premise was too far fetched, corny the little girl was annoying, it was too liberal and one sided (appealing to gay marriage and anti pro-life) the best part was when he seemed to come to his senses and start preparing to take this "situation" seriously. the best part was when the girl ran away to her mom's house. that was the best part everything leading up to it (except for the portral of the brain dead papparzzi) was pointless.
Bob H gave it a2:
An extremely weak attempt at political satire that provides neither insight or entertainment. The premise is beyond absurd although I'm more than willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a good plot and intriguing character development. Sadly the execution of this already hackneyed script makes the preposterous premise the least of this movie's faults. Without spoiling too much (not that there's much to spoil), this movie essentially tries to get some cheap laughs at the expense of the world's easiest targets - politician. The makers of this film spend an agonizingly long two hours trying to tell us something we've known ever since we hit the age of reason - that our elected officials and their cronies are deceptive charlatans who will say or do anything to get a necessary vote. Wow, what an incredibly profound observation. The movie's greatest fault, however, lies with its unsympathetic, unappealing, bland cast of characters. The screw-up dad/precocious child tandem has already been beaten to death in myriad other films and television programs but "Swing Vote" fails to present even a moderately intriguing father-and-daughter duo with the tired old forumla. Costner's Bud character isn't a lovable screw-up. He's an idiotic, lazy, criminal alcoholic who is incapable of providing for his daughter both tangibly and emotionally and quite frankly does not mature intellectually or aesthetically or undergo any positive character development until the final five minutes of the film when he improbably transforms into a hyper-concered citizen who moderates presidential debates. Ridiculous. Equally odious is Madeline Carroll's character, an impossibly intelligent child who spends the entire film carrying on like the spawn of Satan, constantly screaming at and berating her roustabout father to the point of insufferability as well as acting like a general smartass to every other adult she encounters. A note to Touchstone Pictures - smart kids aren't cute when they're constantly acting snarky, bitchy, and mean-spirited. Kelsey Grammer, Nathan Lane, and Dennis Hopper try their best with the massive pile of excrement that was handed to them and their efforts are the only reason this movie doesn't get a zero from me. Still, they fail just as this movie fails. Paula Patton plays an irrelevant role and acts as a quasi-love interest for Costner's character that goes nowhere. The chronically unfunny George Lopez also has a minor, exceedingly pointless part too. I think Nana Visitor from Deep Space Nine was also in it for about eight seconds but I was too busy digging around for a rope to strangle myself with by that point in the movie. I'd rather watch Battlefield Earth a million times over than be subjected to viewing even a scene from this horror show again. Stay away.
Jay H gave it a5:
The cast is very likable and Kevin Costner makes a surprisingly good redneck. The story however is so insanely far fetched that it is impossible to fully enjoy the film. It is such a silly premise. A waste of good talent.
Mark B. gave it an8:
Making imitation Alfred Hitchcock movies isn't all that hard to do (and many of us who have watched Brian DePalma's career over the last decade wish to God he'd go back to doing them), but making imitation Frank Capra movies...well, that's tough. Those who try to do so often forget that the final quarter of It's A Wonderful Life is really one of the darkest movies ever made (the better, more powerful and more radiant when Capra finally turns on the light), and so for every effort that works (like last year's lovely, fanciful The Astronaut Farmer from the Polish brothers, or the 1980 John Ritter gem Hero At Large, a charming unofficial redo of Meet John Doe) you get ten or so like 2001's The Majestic, which triple Capra's speechifying and sugar content while slowing his unerring sense of pace, which in the 1930s rivaled that of Howard Hawks' screwball comedies, to a near-comatose crawl. One reason Swing Vote works so well is that it doesn't sentimentalize its hero (if you can call him that), Bud Johnson; in the film's early scenes, his job loss is clearly not that of the economy or the system, but his own damn fault. (This movie is far more honest in its discussion of the immigration issue than this year's heavily manipulative indie smash The Visitor.) This gives Kevin Costner the opportunity to do what he does best: here, as in Bull Durham and The Upside of Anger, he plays a fundamentally OK but deeply flawed good guy, with the emphasis on flawed. His personal Jiminy Cricket (whom, thanks to his very heavily liquid diet, he's usually too woodenheaded to pay much heed to) is his conscientious, civic-minded daughter Molly (newcomer Madeleine Carroll, who, had this movie gotten better reviews or box office, would have been instantly set up as the next Abigail Breslin). She begs him to vote for the next President, but since he's busy proving why maybe the old practice of closing the bars on Election Day wasn't such a bad idea after all, she takes matters into her own small hands,with resulting complications that, while totally impossible to conceive 10 years ago, subsequent history has made just amusingly improbable now. The Electoral College renders Bud's one mere do-over vote the deciding factor in who takes the White House; as a result, the Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and his Democratic challenger (Dennis Hopper) and their respective campaign managers (Stanley Tucci, Nathan Lane) go to absurd, often hilarious and occasionally chilling lengths to suck up to Bud and secure his loyalty. Those who slam Swing Vote's satire as being toothless forget that Claude Rains in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, while the villain, wasn't a bad person but a decent, idealistic one who got corrupted along the way...sadly, in almost 70 years the more things change the more they remain the same (a hard lesson for those of us who thought that John Edwards was the greatest guy in American politics only to recently learn that he's as human as the rest of us). That's why the evenhanded Swing Vote, in true Capra fashion, works as nicely as it does, even if, like me, you have issues with what it chooses to do and not do in its final 10 minutes; neither candidate (or campaign manager, somewhat surprisingly) is evil at all. Thus, even though Swing Vote scores some of its biggest points and laughs by parallelling Hopper's inability to relate to the so-called "common man" with John Kerry's, Michael Dukakis's and Walter Mondale's similar ineptitude, Grammer's GOP antagonist is, unlike the current office holder, charming, intelligent and silver-tongued (if a bit patronizing). In the Swing Vote universe there are no equivalents to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or George W. you-know-who. Works for me!
Rev. Rikard gave it a4:
This film insults the political savy of sotherners, while melting the political process down into an oversimplified, sappy stew. Costner's "Bubba" gets old within ten minutes, which is about as long as the film should be.
Ally W gave it an8:
I did not have high expectations, but my wife and I loved this movie. Despite the outrageous premise, the movie was smart, funny, and had moving moments of profound depth. Good performances by the actresses playing Bud's daughter and ex-wife.
Jess E gave it an8:
Whether you like the movie or not depends on whether you like Costner or not. In this film he delivers a charming performance along with newcomer 12yr old Madeline Carroll. The film is funniest when it depicts the two campaigns trying to fit into Costner's character political opinions. No new ground broken here but it is a delightfullight hearted comedy that is worth seeing if you can break away from seeing the current Special effects action flicks over and over and over and over again. Don't people ever get tired of seeing a film so many times so soon. Evidently not. Catch Swing vote. It deserves an audience.
