4 out of 10
 

As an impersonation of Bill Clinton, John Travolta`s "Jack Stanton", a Governor of a Southern state who runs successfully for President, is the performance of a lifetime, and well beyond anything that should have guaranteed him an Oscar.

Regrettably, though, it is all completely a waste of time. You know a movie must be in trouble when the man next to you starts looking at his watch and the guy in front leaves an hour before the end. There`s a few amusing lines in the first half an hour, but after that, the film just keeps getting ever more boring with the only laughs coming from the excruciatingly bad special effects, like the actors sitting in an obviously fake car with a picture of a passing road projected onto a studio wall behind them - (I thought that went out in the 1950`s!)

The central problem, though, is so fundamental as to be beyond belief. The role model Clinton's are, very simply, extremely boring, ordinary people. Perhaps we have grown used to a US President as being either some sort of dynamic, Harrison Ford or a gangster conspiring with the CIA to "terminate" his mistress, not a fat, down-at-heel slob who lives on junk food and slept with his babysitter in a roach motel. Furthermore, with John Travolta`s performance so close to the real thing, one ends up feeling that one is not watching a parody, but a documentary.

At the end of the film, one is left with the impression that Bill Clinton is just an over grown small town boy in whose hands the Economics and Nuclear Arsenals of the Western World are perfectly safe on the grounds that he`s too small-minded and unimaginative to think of anything corrupt to do with it all, apart from having it away with the wife`s hairdresser.