Mr. Cranky's rating:
This movie doesn't work as a drama. It should have been made as a cartoon because Kevin Costner does one hell of an Elmer Fudd.
I keep thinking there must be some reason Kevin Costner is such a big star and some reason film studios are willing to pay him millions of dollars to act in their motion pictures. I wish they'd tell us what that reason is. Does his penis taste like chocolate?
This film is an account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which -- as everyone who didn't attend history class stoned knows -- occurred in October of 1962. To summarize: The USSR was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. said, "No way, Dude. Those could hit us." The U.S. decided that they were going to bomb the piss out of Fidel Castro and his little commie island nation. However, some Kennedy administration predicted the Soviets wouldn't care for this too much, so JFK (Bruce Greenwood) decided a blockade would be better. However, he called it a "quarantine" because a blockade was technically an act of war and that's what they were trying to avoid. For thirteen days, the Kennedys fought with the military higher-ups, who wanted to attack Cuba, and barely avoided a nuclear war.
This movie doesn't work as a drama. It should have been made as a cartoon because Kevin Costner does one hell of an Elmer Fudd. Do you remember that freaky-sounding voice he called an accent in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves"? This guy could not do a simple British accent; who thought he was going to pull off Boston upper class? He sounds like Elmer Fudd telling Bugs Bunny, "Ooooh, Mwister Pwesident. There are missows is Koober. Huh, uh, uh, uh." I don't know how anybody on the set could have stood there listening to that and not laughed their ass off. "Take five" must have turned into "take lithium."
What's amazing about this event is how neither the U.S. nor the USSR had thought to set up some sort of phone connection so that they could communicate. You sit there watching this stupid situation thinking, "Why doesn't Kennedy just pick up the phone and call Kruschev?" Apparently, he couldn't. If that's not a missed sponsorship opportunity for 1-800-Collect, I don't know what is. In the end, the military comes out of this film looking pretty damn frightening. Their answer to just about every tense situation is either "fire at it" or "drop a bomb on it." Then again, with Elmer Fudd giving out free advice, the logic of that strategy does make some sense.
Was it really that bad?
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