Swing Vote

As the election season heats up, so do the politically-themed movies -- and right out of the gate is Swing Vote, a non-stop laugh machine which proves itself to be a landslide comedy winner.

Just when months of presidential campaigning are threatening to burn out many American voters, along comes Swing Vote to remind us again what's important.

If you can get over the big stretch of believing that a national election can boil down to a single vote, you’ll find an intelligent script that poses tough questions about the importance of everyone’s vote, but does it in a clever, entertaining way.

The film seems like a loose and uncredited updating of The Great Man Votes, a more serious 1939 entry in which an alcoholic widower with kids turns out to be the only registered voter in a precinct.

The idea of an entire election coming down to one man's vote is admittedly just a tad difficult to accept. But the movie makes a plucky stab at explaining how it comes to happen -- and it almost sounds plausible.

A gentle but effective political satire with a laudable message: Your vote really does count.

It's an enjoyable movie that has the capacity to make you laugh, choke you up and get you pondering the civic responsibility we all take for granted.

Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.

Though not quite Capraesque, Swing Vote is a pleasant political comedy and satire that winds up making you glad to be an American.

Anyone who approaches the movie with hopes of finding a serious elucidation of an intriguing political hypothetical will be disappointed.

Swing Vote captures the spirit of an election year when many once-apathetic Americans are keenly interested in the outcome. We have met the enemy and he is us. But so is the hero.

The filmmakers hit with the big picture and miss mostly with the broad comedy, which is meant to hammer home the sideshow of our process at times, the platitudes and jingoistic baloney over real answers.

Novice director Joshua Michael Stern simply doesn't have the gift of making us ever fully believe its impossible situation. The thing is far too absurd and broadly played for its own good.

As the real-life presidential election approaches, Swing Vote offers a pleasantly goofy civics lesson that voters and candidates alike should take to heart.

After years of misfires, Kevin Costner has hit upon a strategy to make himself likable in a movie: by playing someone completely unlikable. Hey, whatever works.

The movie is over-long and gets too close to schmaltzy from time to time, but it's mostly brisk and bright and very funny, and there's a good lesson in there about voting.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

Swing Vote is an amiable lug of a movie, part public service announcement, part political satire and part good-old-boy comedy with a spritz of sentiment hanging over the entire enterprise.

A timely -- yet timeless -- political comedy packing a welcome reminder that Kevin Costner can still make contact when he gets a pitch he can hit.

For the most part, the movie is a comedy, and it works best on that level. Costner's performance is solid.

Some good performances and a light directorial touch keep it from being boring, but when all's said and done, there's not much really there.

Swing Vote lopes along and is best taken as a tale of a father and a daughter coming through a rough patch to a better place, rather than anything to do with actual real-world politics.

Viewers who demand absolute reality in their comedies will dismiss Swing Vote early, but the premise deserves a fighting chance.

Neither nimble enough to reflect the times nor passionate enough to be inspiring, the election year comedy relies on broad-side-of-a-barn caricatures and out-of-the-mouths-of-babes platitudes.

Like so many politicians, Swing Vote panders to too many special interests and winds up losing on substance.

Overall, the material is lame as well as farfetched, and whenever the melodrama rears its ugly head, the flicker of comedy fizzles.

Like some unwieldy piece of legislation, Swing Vote smacks of a lost opportunity -- a chance to make an important statement, but watered down by compromises.

Costner, who also serves as producer, has his stamp all over this goofy comedy that eventually morphs into heartfelt drama.

Swing Vote can't decide whether it wants to be an edgy political satire or a heartwarming family drama. Consequently, it bounces awkwardly between the two, creating disconcerting shifts in tone.

This is an undeniably formidable cast, but in the lead Costner mostly swears and cackles like a hopped-up hillbilly, although he does have a nice rapport with Carroll.

If the title hadn't already been taken by another equally strained recent comedy, the new Kevin Costner vehicle could have been dubbed Idiocracy.

First-time director/screenwriter Joshua Michael Stern has a knack for Gilmore Girls-style bantering, but not satire.

Carroll manages to capture both sides of Molly's personality without ever being too cloying or cute. At times she even outshines Costner, and that's no easy task.

It's too preachy at the end, too profane to be family-friendly, a little too soft to be edgy.

Political comedy uses wild premise to serve up a civics lessons without much substance.

The covert intelligence embedded in the boobish political comedy Swing Vote states that we the people are stupid, drunk, apathetic, or all of the above.

Swing Vote needed a liberal rewrite to make it more conservative in approach. The indecision as to what kind of movie this was to be ends up being the film's downfall.

This is pitched as very broad comedy, and Costner plays Bud as a lovable loser -- Tin Cup without the low handicap.

The film radiates squandered potential in every frame. Under the direction of co-writer Joshua Michael Stern, it emerges as third-rate Capracorn, leaden and lumpy where it should be swift and pointed.

Like so many presidential candidates, Swing Vote falls victim to unfulfilled promises, wasted opportunities and smug self-satisfaction.

The television-ad spoofs are sort of amusing, and you can't fault Costner, who seems to be having fun for a change.

Leave it to the Walt Disney Company to deliver an ode to the American working poor that also happens to be the most condescending movie of 2008.

The film eventually bogs down in drama, with an unnecessary subplot involving Bud's estranged wife and an ethical dilemma for a local news reporter that never really gets off the ground.

The lightweight Swing Vote is a good-ol'-boy civics lesson that's too scattered to achieve its predictable goals.

It's easy to look past the unrealistic concept for Swing Vote, but bouts of predictability and a true lack of originality hurt the cause. Additionally, a confused combination of comedy and drama tends to overlap in all the wrong places.

Swing Vote, an oddly off-balance comedy directed by Joshua Michael Stern, feels like two movies; one much better than the other.

As often happens with politics, even as Swing Vote entertains, it leaves us feeling like we've been subjected to some slick manipulation and worse, left with promises unfulfilled.

Writer/director Joshua Michael Stern sets his phasers to "crowd pleaser." Corn-fed classic rock staples fill his soundtrack, while scenes end predictably on the back-beats of forced one-liners.

It is not a non-stop laugh riot. It's not even a comedy. However, it will make you stand up and cheer when it ends, because you'll be so happy it's over.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize. It's predicated on so many forces of incompetence converging in a single spot that it feels like farce for dummies.

Satire should hurt and personal redemption needs to be earned; Swing Vote fails to deliver on both counts.

Swing Vote may muster a few easy laughs, but the film is no contender.

This movie crashes and burns faster than a Michael Dukakis campaign. Its attempt at commentary of American culture and politics misses several points.

One of the most idiotic movies about the American political process ever made.

It's a hard call as to whether Swing Vote's mirthlessness is more oppressive than its insulting idea of Costner's loser as the working-class salt of the earth, or if its dishonesty takes the prize.

By the time Swing Vote is finished canonizing Costner, it's unclear how we're supposed to respond. But much like the endless presidential campaigns it tries to satirize, you do wish it would shut up.

As hollow as the worst political discourse America has seen lately, less coherent than most of it and, unforgivably, is far less entertaining than the real thing is at the moment.

If you ask me, Costner's charm disappeared in a puff of smoke long ago, but that doesn't discourage him and director Joshua Michael Stern from indulging in movie-star hubris that bloats the movie well past the two-hour mark.