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Trump: “There was a little bit of a restriction like 50 or 75 years before you could take another vote because, you know, a country can’t go through that too much"
Responding to comments, actor Brian Cox told Sky News: "He’s talking bollocks. I’m sorry, but he does. It’s rubbish. Let’s get on with it and let’s get it [independence] done. We can do it.
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Toronto Festival Adds Bobby Farrelly, Brian Cox, Aziz Ansari and Guillermo del Toro Films
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The Independent: You Want Some? You’ll Have To Get It Somewhere Else
Certain actors should never play certain roles, but John Cena as a presidential candidate in The Independent (2022) is, believe it or not, a toss-up.
On the one hand, why not? He’s great on the mic and can cut a promo with the best of them. Moreover, if there’s a second career other than acting that pro wrestlers seem to transition well into, it’s politics — to which acting itself is a tried-and-true launching pad. Governor Jesse Ventura and Mayor Glenn Jacobs are probably the two biggest success stories, but plenty of grapplers have run for public office after hanging up the boots. The key difference? Ventura and Jacobs — not to mention Trump, who often blurred the line between wrestling and politics himself — leaned into their ring personas when they hit the campaign trail. They understood that in the age of spectacle, embracing your larger-than-life image sells better than scrubbing it off.
On the other hand, The Independent purports to be a serious political drama/thriller, something along the lines of Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs or George Clooney’s The Ides of March. The fact alone that those two heavy hitters fell short of a home run (one much shorter than the other) should tip you off that this genre isn’t easy at all to pull off. And trying to stick a figure like Cena into this mold without a game plan only underlines how slippery the political drama can be when it forgets to pick a lane.
The Independent makes a big deal about the importance (real or perceived) of experience in both politics and journalism. Paradoxically, it’s safe to say that writer Evan Parter and director Amy Rice’s greenness took a massive toll on their movie. Only a filmmaker too naïve (or too jaded, and I doubt that’s the case here) would open the movie with Cena’s character quoting near verbatim from Cena’s ring entrance song (“Their time is up! Our time is now!”) during a speech at a rally with mere days to go until the election. That’s too on the nose to be funny even if this were supposed to be a comedy — which it’s not.
Right off the bat, you’re setting the wrong tone for the story, and the movie, which wouldn’t stand much of a chance regardless, never recovers from that initial faux pas. Worse yet, it exposes a core indecision that plagues the whole production. If you’re going to put John Cena in a political movie and still make him sound like a pro wrestler, don’t half-ass it. Don’t just quote his theme song. Have him come out with his music blasting on the PA system, wearing his full gear, yelling “The Prez is Here!!!” and so on and so forth. Better to embrace the silliness than be silly just for the hell of it and then move on like it never happened.
The whole thing just feels as though the movie got caught picking its nose and simply wiped its finger on its lapel and kept going merrily along — well, guess what? The snot’s still there and we can all see it, and you can ignore it all you want but it’s not going away.
The weirdest thing of all is that Cena, who otherwise seems like a smart guy, co-executive produced this thing. If he’s trying to move away from action and branch out into, as it were, ‘adult’ roles, this is not the way to go. Luckily for him, he’s only in a handful of scenes, a couple of them with Brian Cox, so as a learning experience it might not have been a total waste (but since Cox is also an executive producer, he may be in short supply of good ideas himself).
Anyway, Cena is the titular independent U.S. Presidential candidate Nate Sterling, “Olympic gold medalist and best-selling author” of a “manifesto” called A Declaration of Independence. What this so-called manifesto manifests is anybody’s guess. Meanwhile, Parter apparently couldn’t settle on a single sport, so he made Sterling a decathlonist — or at least that’s what I infer from the phrase “Running for president is more grueling than decathlon.” (Cena played football in college in real life, but they don’t give out gold medals for that.) The irony is that in trying to check every ‘impressive credentials’ box, the film only makes Sterling feel like an empty suit — a grab bag of empty accolades, much like the script itself.
The film overall is hazy like that. Heroine Eli James (Jodie Turner-Smith), a reporter with the fictional Washington Chronicle, keeps bringing up “a high school in West Virginia” that’s getting the short end of a lottery scam that Sterling may or may not be involved with. When told that the scam is a victimless crime, she replies, “Tell that to the class of invisible kids in West Virginia.” It never occurs to her that she’s not doing a very good job of putting this unnamed high school on the map — unless it happens to be the only high school in West Virginia, which I doubt. The Mountain State may be the 10th-smallest state by area and the 12th-least populous, but it ain’t that small either.
Even the specifics are somehow vague. Climate change, war, terrorism, recession, school shootings, the pandemic — they’re all checked off, but other than mentioning them, the movie has nothing to say about any of these issues. In that sense, the script sounds just like those politicians (i.e., all of them) who talk a lot without saying anything. Which would be great if the film were aiming for satire. But I’m afraid it’s all in earnest. This is the most frustrating thing of all: The Independent acts like it’s giving you hard-hitting political commentary, but it’s really just mouthing platitudes. You can’t outdo the vacuousness of real campaign rhetoric by playing it straight — not unless you’ve got the guts to make that your point.
There’s also a rather odd reference to the United States Capitol attack. The movie is set in 2024, around the time of that year’s elections, but the incumbent president is called Archer, not Biden. Now, the movie doesn’t name Trump either, but the Capitol reference leaves no doubt that he exists in the world of this film. So, what gives? I mean, even a dumb sci-fi flick like Contact managed to work Bill Clinton into its storyline. Either don’t mess with the chronology or set the plot no earlier than 2028. It’s another case of the filmmakers trying to have it both ways — a ‘real’ political thriller too scared to face reality.
And speaking of shoddy time management, Eli’s mentor Nicholas Booker (Cox) tasks her with recruiting a double agent — a PR associate at some company or other. The PR associate is reluctant, leading Eli to steal some information from the PR associate’s boss or something (for which Booker gives her a tongue lashing that’s well-deserved but doesn’t appear to truly get through her thick skull). A couple of scenes later, the PR associate has a change of heart when she’s asked to give money to Sterling’s opponent’s campaign fund. All that this achieves, other than waste our precious time, is show how low Eli is willing to sink to get her story — again, not necessarily a bad thing if you’re aiming for long-term character development.
The only, two-fold problem is that 1) Eli has already been established as lacking discernment (by an incident that took place before the events of the movie), and 2) she will later get caught trying to steal more information, this time from Sterling himself. Unfortunately, The Independent isn’t a spoof on piss-poor journalism any more than it is a political send-up.
Political dramas are a high-wire act. If you’re too subtle, you risk sounding toothless. Too blatant, and you veer into parody. And if you split the difference without a clear sense of purpose, you end up with something like The Independent — a film that desperately wants to be timely and hard-hitting but never musters the courage to pick a side, a stance, or even a coherent point of view.
Works Cited
The Independent. Directed by Amy Rice, written by Evan Parter, performances by John Cena, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Brian Cox, Relativity Media, 2022.
The Ides of March. Directed by George Clooney, Columbia Pictures, 2011.
Lions for Lambs. Directed by Robert Redford, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2007.
Contact. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, performances by Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, Warner Bros., 1997.
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Brian Cox Decided to Become a Character Actor After Visiting Hollywood: ‘It Really Gave Me the Creeps’
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