‘Reagan’ Is a Terrible Movie. But Not Because It’s Conservative.

I did not expect Reagan, the new biopic about the 40th president of the United States, to be narrated by a former KGB agent played by Jon Voight, who does a very bad Russian accent. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have expected the KGB agent to be Reagan’s biggest fan. Nor that his fawning about the president would be addressed to a young Russian politician who, the film suggests, is being groomed as a successor to Vladimir Putin.

“At college he was bringing people together, solving problems!” Voight crows, in his best Count Chocula.

A deeply bizarre 135 minutes, Reagan is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and as a critic, I am not alone in this assessment. “Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad,” says New York magazine. The Washington Post called it a “shallow hagiography.” The film has a 20 percent critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But the audience rating is something else entirely; at the time of writing, it is 98 percent. And defenders of Reagan are citing this figure as evidence that the sneering reviews are worthless. “While these insuffable [sic] critics—who oftentimes exist only to tear down the blood, sweat, and tears of truly creative people—look down their entitled noses at ‘REAGAN,’ the people absolutely love it,” argued former Reagan employee Douglas MacKinnon, for Fox News, capitalizing on the popular (and often correct) perception of critics as snobs who are wrong about everything.

Well, we’re not. You don’t have to be liberal or elite to see that this is a bad film. The problem with it is not that it portrays Reagan in a positive light, it’s that it is so adulatory that it robs the former president of his humanity, turning him into an incessantly quippy, one-dimensional, anti-communist crusader. Reagan as played by Dennis Quaid is as blameless as Christ on the cross, only somehow less human and complex. At least Jesus wept! 

Dennis Quaid in Reagan. (Reagan/MJM Entertainment)

The biopic is produced by Mark Joseph, the man behind several Christian movies and a documentary called No Safe Spaces, about conservatives getting canceled on campus. He is a classic example of what is going wrong with conservative filmmaking, in that he openly brands himself as ideological, and purposefully sets out to oppose the status quo. There are many such cases, from the Daily Wire–produced school shooting thriller Run Hide Fight to explicitly evangelical flicks like God’s Not Dead. They demonstrate how today’s conservative film industry is trying to disrupt woke Hollywood at the expense of making good art. The films are almost always heavy-handed, eliminating any semblance of moral ambiguity, creating one-dimensional characters who traverse a Manichaean world of good and evil. 

In other words, they fall into all the same traps as the didactic liberal films that conservatives complain about. Films like Mimi Leder’s 2018 movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, On The Basis of Sex, is a total Reagan-esque hagiography, a fact that critics rightfully acknowledged and wrongly excused. Both these movies are proof that highly ideological films are never very good. But didacticism is less common when liberals make films because of long-standing liberal cultural dominance—in other words, they assume (often correctly) that the average person, or at least the average critic, already agrees with them. Conservative filmmakers tend to lean into the sense that they’re embattled—which means shoving conservatism down the audience’s throat.

Conservatives are perfectly capable of making good movies, including movies with right-wing themes. Mel Gibson’s 2006 Apocalypto, for instance, is excellent. Following a tribesman’s escape from the human-sacrificing Mayan Empire, it opens with a quote from historian Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” And it closes with the arrival of Spanish priests. Gibson, who directed, wrote, and produced the film, is a devout traditional Catholic. With just one quote at the beginning of the film and one short, subtle ending scene, Gibson makes his thesis unambiguous to anyone who bothered to consider it: Mayan civilization was rotten to the core, and its colonization by European Christian powers was both a justified and positive development. The difference is that Gibson makes his point—and the viewer is invited to consider the thesis—instead of bashing us over the head with it. A viewer can disagree with Gibson’s thesis, even object to it, and still find the movie to be a thrilling epic about the resilience of the human spirit—which it is.   

Or take Clint Eastwood. He’s a run-of-the mill Boomer Republican, and his movies sometimes show it, yet they still retain a certain level of coarseness and moral ambiguity. Nobody’s taking their Bible study group to see Gran Torino.

Clearly, right-wingers can make excellent movies when their goal is to make excellent movies. The trouble with today’s conservative film industry is that its primary goal is propagandist. Good storytelling is a secondary goal that will always be sacrificed in pursuit of the first, which is how you get a film like Reagan. The fact that some people lapped it up doesn’t mean it was secretly good.

Art is not a democracy—thank God—and even if it were, Reagan was a primary, not a general election. Every audience voter was on the same side. It shouldn’t be surprising that people who paid to see the Reagan hagiography liked the Reagan hagiography. Media made for a specific audience, and virtually no one else, often appeals to the intended audience. Shocker! Next headline: ”Despite bad reviews by heterosexual critics, new gay porno finds broad acclaim with homosexual viewers.”

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River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice, and read his piece “Stop Saying Florida Isn’t Safe for Gay People. It’s Fine.”

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