A decent comedy featuring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as two men running for Congressman of a South Carolina district. Ferrell is the incumbent, a Democrat who is at first running unopposed, but when he is exposed as a sex fiend, two powerful industrialists (Dan Akroyd and John Lithgow, playing the Motch Brothers, parodying the notorious Koch Brothers, who have stupidly bitched about the movie in the media) decide to throw a bunch of money at a Republican opponent. The only person they can find is Zach Galifianakis, a goofy guy with a very normal family and a couple of pugs with which he's obsessed. Things get nasty pretty quickly as Ferrell spies his opponent's weaknesses, and the Motch Brothers respond in kind by sending an evil campaign runner (Dylan McDermott) to groom Galifianakis in dirty politics. This film starts off pretty well, with some huge laughs (particularly the scene where Galifianakis' family admits all the dirty secrets they've been hiding from him), but after a while it kind of fades. It's always pretty funny, but it's almost never hilarious in the latter half. It seems to want to be a biting satire, but it's really not saying anything truly daring, so that never gets off the ground. Ferrell and Galifianakis both give very good performances, but about the only other actor to score any laughs is McDermott. Jason Sudeikis plays Will Ferrell's campaign runner, but has little to do. Lithgow and Akroyd seem like a waste, too, and one wonders why they bothered to hire Brian Cox as Galifianakis' dad (he does have one good scene near the beginning. I did like Karen Maruyama as Cox's Asian maid, whom he pays $50 a day extra to talk like an old-timey black woman. And Sarah Baker is pretty good as Galifianakis' wife. All in all, I did like the film, but I could have waited for video.
Review of The Campaign
