Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

I'm about 75 percent sure there's a message buried in this latest Kevin Costner vehicle, SWING VOTE, and I could even venture a couple of guesses as to what that message is. But I'll be damned if director Joshua Michael Stern (who also co-wrote with Jason Richman) makes it easy to figure out what that message is. This could be the first-ever, two-hour infomercial attempting to convince Americans to vote, and while that's an admirable goal, I think I'd get just as much out of a 30-second Rock the Vote PSA hosted by Diddy. The film's not-so-subtle and yet utterly vague themes are lost amid a sea of plain-old ham-handed filmmaking that is trying to go for a Frank Capra vibe but instead feels like bad melodrama with nearly all the actors overplaying their parts.

Costner plays Bud Johnson, a New Mexico hick, who works in a egg-processing plant, spends most of his nights drinking away the little money he has and largely ignores the care and well-being of his 12-year-old daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll). On election day, Bud promises Molly he'll vote, but after getting laid off from his job, Bud goes on a bender, bumps his head on the way to the polling place and sleeps through the process. Waiting for him at the polling place, Molly takes advantage of a sleeping election official and begins to cast her dad's vote for her, but just as she's about to vote for the president, the power goes out in her electronic voting machine and her vote is never cast. Turns out that this particular election (between candidates played by Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper) is so close that the entire determination of who gets New Mexico's five electoral votes (and thus the entire election) comes down to Bud's vote. The course of American history comes down to an apathetic man who never actually voted in the first place.

I'll give the film some credit: it doesn't rely on actors delivering fake national news reports to track this story. All networks and cable news channels are represented here with their real anchors and political analysts. Even Bill Maher sipped a little bit of the Kool-Aid that this film had an important vision to fulfill. The only actor playing a reporter is Paul Patton as a local New Mexico TV journalist who discovers the identity of the state's single swing voter and becomes friendly with the family.

Both candidates take private meetings with Bud, while the men running their campaigns (Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci) scheme to figure out what it will take to get this one man's vote. The result is some fairly amusing political TV spots that might be the only thing in this movie that made me laugh (Hopper has an anti-abortion commercial that must be seen to be believed). But in the end, it's young Molly who acts as Bud's moral compass as she goes through hundreds of letters from struggling U.S. citizens just like Bud who simply want their individual voices to be heard.

The obvious message here is that every vote counts. I'm not sure SWING VOTE makes me believe that now any more than I did after the Florida recount in 2000. The film might also be making the case that even the dumbest voter still has the right and responsibility to do his or her duty. I think even the dumbest voter can figure that out without sitting through this movie. The film takes a weirdly and tonally jarring serious shift in the final 20 minutes or so culminating in a speech by Costner that seems to have been crafted by someone far more intelligent than any character racing around this movie. Like all modern celebrities, Bud falls out of favor with the American people as quickly as he became famous. But by that point in the story, I'd so completely lost interest in this terrible parent and uninspiring American.

An out-of-left-field subplot involving Molly's absent mother goes nowhere and should have been the first thing cut from this film in desperate need of editing. On his worst day, I consider Kevin Costner a great actor; I truly do. But he's not even trying here. Does he think that wearing a baseball cap and letting his hair look messy somehow constitutes solid acting? His character goes from potentially endearing to annoying without too much effort. The film has about as much political kick as Robin Williams' Man of the Year from two years ago, but at least that film had Christopher Walken to keep me amused. In the end, I can't say there's anything humorous or compelling enough about SWING VOTE to recommend you go and see it.

-Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com