The Contender, in a sense, is a movie that fails. Why? Well the acting is tremendous, let's just get that out of the way right off the bat. Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges are very deserving of their Oscar nominations. However the movie fails because it uses these great actors in what ultimately turns out to be a decent, yet mediocre movie. There was certainly nothing tremendous, or unique about this story. We have seen this all before with our previous president. Sex scandals are condemning, but not enough to keep someone from getting to the position that they want to get to (and keep in mind, they never disclosed to the public that the "incident" never happened, so in the public's mind, the Allen character was...well guilty for lack of a better word). In fact our past President's story is much more riveting because he was the President when the scandal happened, and it happened in the White House. Now I know this movie tries to put a different spin on this issue by using a woman as the character caught in an alleged sex scandal, and suggesting that because it is a woman it is different. In other words a woman would never get a way with this kind of scandal and a man would. However, if they wanted to feed off of that different spin then they should have provided different results from what occurred in the Clinton scandal. Instead the same results were exhibited. The Democrats said "who cares," and the Republicans said "hang her." If they wanted to make it so different then everyone would have wanted her out of the picture, period. This movie also got a little caught up in the "Democrat good, Republican bad" idea. If the story could have been a little more objective, then it would have been a little more powerful. And one more thing, I don't care if it is a woman, a man, a Democrat, or a Republican. If you put someone in the position that the Joan Allen character was in, and they publicly admitted that they did not believe in God, then they would not get confirmed. The bottom line is: 90-95% of Americans believe in some sort of higher deity, and they would not want an atheist second-in-command. Overall, a "missed the mark" movie that could have been so much more. But like I have said before, that's just my opinion.
Review of The Contender
