‘Reagan’: Rotten Tomatoes Score: Critics: 18, Audience: 98

PG-13 | 2h 15m | Biopic | Aug. 30, 2024
Analyzing the critics-versus-audience Rotten Tomatoes skew has become my favorite jumping-off point for film reviews. What is it, really? It’s Progressive-versus-The Silent Majority; it’s the American film-o-meter that divides America’s movie tastes along political lines; the mostly-liberal versus the mostly-conservative.
“Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid, is a nearly 2 1/2 hour long clarion call for America to wake up to the insidious evils of communism, couched in a hagiographic biopic about America’s folksiest modern president. It makes sense that the mostly liberal critic body hates it.
I understand them. You couldn’t find a more liberal upbringing than I had: Original 1960s’ hippie-artist parents embracing the back-to-the-land zeitgeist; living on communes; jazz musicians jamming in the barn; bonfires with the local motorcycle gang; playwright Sam Shepard hanging around with his omnipresent thick sheaf of scripts; getting stuck in the notorious traffic jam headed to the original 1969 Woodstock. Heady times.
My parents’ Yale University and other Ivy League drop-out commune painters-poets-sculptors-musicians-intellectuals friends were obviously all jammed over to the left. It seemed cool because no one knew any better. It felt benevolent, too. Little did that crowd know that the cultural phenomenon of free love, drugs, and rock-n-roll were all things scripted and planned by Soviet communists decades prior. It unfolded like clockwork.
I thought I hated Ronald Reagan back in the day. Huey Lewis and the News were singing “It’s Hip to be Square” in 1986, halfway through Reagan’s tenure, but I couldn’t see it yet.
The Epoch Times’ founders fled the Chinese Communist Party to embrace freedom of speech in America. ET knows communism. I started writing for The Epoch Times (ET) and was required to deprogram from the creeping communism that’s invaded the USA via modern liberalism, progressivism, and socialism, all of which is intended to move societies incrementally towards communism like the proverbial boiling frog. I watched former KGB member Yuri Bezmenov’s talks on cultural Marxism. And lo and behold, eventually former hated conservative pundits like Patrick Buchanan suddenly started sounding like sage elders. Even people I formerly considered lunatic fringe types, like Ted Nugent, started appearing normal.
So what’s the point? Unless someone of the liberal persuasion really takes the time to drill down into what communism actually is, how it started, and why it’s the most insidious and lethal thing in the world today, it’s impossible for him or her to see it.
First things first: Dennis Quaid is a fine Reagan—perfect casting. I just can’t decide if I’d rather have seen young, hungry, risk-taking Quaid play Reagan in old-makeup, or old, successful, complacent Quaid—who looks and sounds more like Reagan with each passing year without even trying—play Ronald Reagan in young-makeup. But that’s splitting hairs.
“Reagan” is narrated throughout by a former KGB agent Viktor Ivanov (Jon Voight). This is an artifice that provides information gleaned from years of Soviet surveillance and acts as tour guide and exposition dump. It doesn’t, however, really add much other than a depiction of a former communist being (fictitiously?) in awe of Reagan’s anti-communist crusade.
Is “Reagan” a movie of great nuance? Not really. It’s a greatest-hits approach. Hagiography? Absolutely. Does that matter? Not if you know the importance of understanding communism. That’s undoubtedly this movie’s mission. It’s an attempt to open people’s eyes to the unclear but present danger America faces.
Reagan attends a dinner, in 1941, at the Coconut Grove with screenwriter and communist Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson), his first wife Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) in tow. As Trumbo puts it: “The American Dream doesn’t apply to all of us equally. We’re doing something about it. Pick a side, Reagan!”
Trumbo, as well as labor leader Herb Sorrell (Mark Kubr) soon discover that the very thought of godless communism gave Reagan hives. He was small-town Illinois-raised, and devoutly religious. Reagan’s life mission and crusade was to kill the Red Menace wherever it lived. He became an FBI informant.
If you’re as politically savvy and dialed-in on communism as most readers of The Epoch Times are, “Reagan” will just affirm what you already know. It will be a mildly nostalgic stroll down memory lane (especially nostalgic is the adorableness of Ron and Nancy—they don’t make marriages like that anymore), or like watching an old VHS movie played for history class. Hopefully, McNamara achieves his goal of waking the progressive-minded to the dangers at hand.