The expectations everyone has set in young George W.Bush (Josh Brolin) are high, him being the offspring of a family of Southern millionaires/politicians, and he is expected to be a good boy in the tradition of his ancestors, including his father, George Bush (James Cromwell), a man who seems to be groomed to be president ... however, young George W. prefers to spend the family fortune to becoming part of the establishment, prefers to party heavily to holding a job, he's a heavy drinker and womanizer, and he frequently gets arrested for his escapades - much to the dismay of his father, who more and more favours his brother Jeb (Jason Ritter) - the good boy who does as he's told - over him.

More and more, his father's dismay gets to young W, so eventually he stops drinking, turns to the church (with Stacy Keach playing his reverend), and marries a decent woman, school teacher/librarian Laura (Elizabeth Banks) - and rather unexpectedly, he helps his father win the 1988 election for president.

New rifts between W and his father arise when George sr doesn't go all the way in the first Gulf War - and when W sees his father a broken man after losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, he decides to go into politics himself, to show his father what he's made of. However, when he wants to run for gouvernor of Texas, his father denies him assistance because he wants to run for Jeb's campaign in Florida. Jeb however loses while W wins.

W suddenly realizes that Texas is only the beginning, now he wants the presidency ... and wouldn't you know it, in 2000 he gets his wish - only to be first regarded as little more than an in-joke on the international political scene ... until terrorists strike on September 9th 2001, and he proves himself capable of handling an international crisis.

The terrorist attacks though and the Afghanistan war that follows them though give the ultra-conservative wing of his cabinet a boost, and thus, morally questionable full-blood politicians like Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) drive him into the Iraq war on the basis of forged evidence and against the advice of W's more level-headed secretary of State Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), a war that seems to be an easy victory at first, until it turns into the attacking forces and into total disaster - leaving W's political legacy seriously tarnished ...

Ellen Burstyn can be seen as George Bush sr's wife Barbara.

Released months before the actual George W.Bush left office, W. failed to create any real stir at the box office, and the explanations were manyfold: That the outgoing president, whose approval ratings at the time of the film's release were only about 20%, was shown into a too sympathetic light, that the moviegoing public wouldn't go to the movies to see the president when they could see him in the TV-news for free, that there wasn't really too much of an audience for political films and so on. However, what everyone seems to forget to notice is something completely else: By and large, W. is a completely toothless film, it totally fails to even touch its satirical potential and comes across as a rather boring matter-of-fact biopic (even though several portions of the film, especially of the White House closed doors meetings are of course completely made up). And apart from director Stone's humourless approach (truth to be told, satire was never Stone's strength to begin with), the film also lacks proper pacing, making it a rather dull sequence of events, edited together in very deliberate order. And since Oliver Stone as a director doesn't add too much originality to the already slightly boring narrative, the outcome is a rather dull affair.

One thing though: Josh Brolin's performance as W is flawless (even if he's a tad too handsome for the part), and he dominates most of the film by impersonating the man without becoming a bland carbon copy, with only James Cromwell (who might look nothing like the older Bush but does a great acting job) and Stacy Keach being able to give him a run for his money. Still, Brolin alone isn't enough to carry a whole biopic.

review � by Mike Haberfelner

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In times of uncertainty of a possible zombie outbreak, a woman has to decide between two men - only one of them's one of the undead.

There's No Such Thing as Zombies
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special appearances by
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directed by
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written by
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produced by
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