Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) is an apathetic slacker drunk who can't even keep his job at the chicken egg factory. It's 2004 presidential election, and he promises his daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll) that he will vote for her school project. He has a bug about jury duty, and is not happy to vote. On election day, Bud gets fired and drink away the day. Molly faithfully waited for him at the polling station. She eventually sneaks in to try to vote for him. However, the machine's cord was pulled and her vote was lost by the machine. The election is a close one, and it all boils down to an unaccounted vote from Molly in place of Bud. Now everybody is pitching Bud for that decisive vote.This is a civics lesson more than a comedy. Bud is not a likable guy. Then you add all those political wonks and TV people. It becomes an avalanche of wonky characters all geared to the heavy handed message of every vote counts. The best thing about this movie is Bud's relationship with his daughter. If it was more about that, the civics lesson could be learned with a lighter touch. Madeline Carroll is the best one of them all. More than anything, this movie suffers from a general political fatigue. It's much better as a movie about a struggling father daughter relationship.

SWING VOTE pretty much got slammed by the critics when it came out and it ended up doing OK at the box office - not great, not horrible - just a flatline somewhat. So very low expectations when we checked this out from the library recently and was pleasantly surprised. Costner has had the typical roller-coaster ride of many male movie stars - after Bull Durham, No Way Out, Dances With Wolves - he was on fire and then the infamous Waterworld and The Postman sunk his career - he smartly went away and then tried to reinvent himself as a character actor - he did some nice work with Joanj Allen in an uneven film Upside Of Anger and I actually am in the minority because I loved his serial killer movie Mr. Brooks - and here he is perfect as Bud Johnson, a beer swilling loser who can barely get up in the morning and he constantly lets down his daughter - a civic minded, A student kid. Carroll gives a terrific performance as Molly - it is multi-layered and she and Costner have a wonderful rapport - Costner looks like crap throughout most of the film and its one of the things that makes the movie work - he looks his age, wrinkled, bags under his eyes, his hair always a mess, a bit of a gut - he seems comfortable int he skin of his small town guy. Yes, the plot takes some swallowing but overall - a nice political comedy with some nice supporting work from stalwarts like Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammar, George Lopez and Stanley Tucci = this is a smart, funny comedy worth seeking out.

Ernest "Bud" Johnson, a man of the people, a Good Third Party Independent completely uninformed as to what is going on outside of his own little world of the little town of Texico New Mexico, with a socially conscious daughter Molly , caught up in the Political scene by his innocent daughter, registering him to vote on election day. A strange series of coincidences leaves the classic swing state of New Mexico EVENLY Spilt 50 50 in the popular vote with Bud Johnsons vote the deciding vote , the next ten days to two weeks are the classic roller coaster political ride that neither he nor his daughter had expected. as every debate needs a moderator , KennedY Nixon 1960 to the present, so none is better to moderate than a good man of the people who realizes his faults in life and bellies up to the podium to moderate.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's not an easy task to make a crowd-pleasing movie centered on politics that goes to such strenuous efforts to be non-partisan and maybe chalk up my dissatisfaction with the movie to that. Then again, it might also have something to do with a critical decision that they made in how to end the movie, which is sure to make every single solitary person who watches it throw up their arms in disgust. But the movie is not about who wins the presidency, it's about the pure chaos of the American political system and its millions of weaknesses and faults. Sure, the premise of a presidential election coming down to a single vote is as preposterous as they come, but man if this movie doesn't get you thinking critically about the electoral process then it's safe to assume that probably nothing ever will. Kevin Costner plays Bud, an American nobody from New Mexico who has never done anything with his life except have a daughter with a delusional drug addict who thinks she has a big singing career in her near future. He works as an egg inspector at an egg packaging plant, and he and his co-workers mourn the loss of their friends' (and soon, their own) jobs to "insourcing," the process of bringing Mexicans in to take their jobs rather than ship the factory and all those egg-laying chickens to Mexico. Bud staggers through life in a drunken daze most of the time, routinely letting down his daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), who raises him like a child. She gets him out of bed in the morning, criticizes his laziness and irresponsibility, reminds him to vote because it's part of a school project that she has to do, and through sighs of exasperation attempts to keep him at least a little bit in line. And of course it's the only thing in life that she fails at. When Bud gets drunk rather than show up to vote, she manages to almost cast his vote herself due to the sleepy voting booth security of beautiful Texico, New Mexico, which Google Earth has just informed me is a real place. Population 1,065.In a clever plot development, it turns out that Bud's vote didn't go completely through but it appeared that he was there, so he is given another opportunity to cast his vote. Not right away, mind you, even though he evidently already tried to vote and thus probably had his mind made up. No, he is given ten days before he has to vote, thus providing plenty of time for a movie to happen.Young Madeline Carroll steals most of the scenes that she's in as Bud's daughter, so it's interesting that her character is one of the biggest weak points in the movie, the other one being her dad. Bud is supposed to be a typical American, but I just saw a drifting drunk who never did anything with his life and never would have had he not been forced to. It's true that the vast majority of Americans live lives that are closer to Bud's than President Boone's (Kelsey Grammar), but does he have to be a TOTAL loser? How about just making him be a likable, regular guy? Like the guy he played in Field of Dreams? When I imagine the average American, I imagine something like Ray Kinsella. Although maybe with a slightly smaller house and less whispering from the sky.The other problem is that the screenwriters overshot the character of Molly by about 160 IQ points. So much for the average American, right? This girl writes a school essay that doesn't merit a special award from the principal to show her dad, it grants her NATIONAL TELEVISED RECOGNITION. But to be honest, I had more of a problem with the fact that not only does she wake her deadbeat dad up in the morning so he could take her to school, she also treks to the bar and, finding him passed out in his truck when he should have been voting, she pushes him over and then drives him home herself. She's about 11 years old. But where the movie succeeds is as a scathing revelation about certain realities of the American electoral process, such as the electoral college, which simplifies the vote-counting process even while massively distorting the actual numbers of who voted for who. The whole movie is about how one man's vote really does matter, but it leaves you with the feeling that you are supposed to forget that once he votes, every single vote in his state for the other candidate WON'T matter anymore, because they'll be switched to the other candidate. Isn't it interesting how that works? Can't we just count every single vote and award each candidate one huge number of individual votes? Seems a little more accurate to me.Anyway, I do appreciate the way the movie highlights the fact that both sides, Republican and Democrat, are equally willing to stoop to any level and do absolutely whatever it takes to win, and that no one is above hitting below the belt and making hugely unethical decisions. There is a lot that needs to be changed in American politics, and even while clearly being based on the Election of 2000, one of the most controversial in American history, it calls those things to attention without ever even hinting that either side is right or wrong. The movie insists that America is the greatest country in the world but that in some ways, we're doing it all wrong, but the fact that a movie like this has the freedom to get made proves that even though we haven't reached a level of pure cohesive harmony, underneath all of our imperfections is a clear desire to get there.