Possibly Satirical Movie Review of New Stephen Miller Movie

Bring Her Back is a look into the mind of a madman or three

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

What should have been a delightful rom-com political romp through the illicit affairs of a criminal presidential regime is instead a psycho-thriller involving impossible plotlines and unrealistic characters.

From a president who speaks so unintelligibly that the viewer wants to throw things at the screen, to an incompetent but sinister director of Homeland Security who loses her purse containing her government IDs at a burger joint, the movie tries, but fails miserably, at satire. Dr. Strangelove, this isn’t.

The film begins interestingly enough when a villainous but inept presidential candidate and Russian plant named Krasnov rigs an election after a relentless campaign of false claims regarding his loss in the previous one. The result is as realistic as it is promising for a political thriller: The opposing party is stymied because it doesn’t want to sound like Krasnov did when he lost, so it refuses to explore the possibility that the new president has engaged in a well-planned technical vote theft in swing states.

But then, mysteriously, the movie steers into another direction, one full of implausible characters and madcap, ridiculous adventures.

The president, played by Sebastian Stan, is incomprehensible when he speaks, to the point of laughter from his adoring fans, who seem to embrace it.

The movie centers on a Joseph Goebbels wannabe who terrorizes the nation with a deportation scheme that sends American citizens to concentration camps in failed states like Sudan and Libya, as well as Guantanamo and a 40,000-inmate prison in El Salvador.

We are treated to a series of vignettes involving the main character, Stephen Miller, a descendant of Jewish immigrants, who we are supposed to believe has become a ruthless Goebbels clone. Miller, played by the always reliable Jeremy Strong, descends into an increasingly vampiric look as he furiously rants in his bedroom, which fills up with photos of well-known American immigrants.

Although she shares his disdain for immigrants, his wife Katie, capably played by Selena Gomez, becomes increasingly concerned as Miller fills the bedroom walls in serial killer fashion with the objects of his wrath.

Then, the movie loses its focus and turns into a ridiculous combination of slapstick comedy, horror, and satire.

A tech bro billionaire, who is always stuffed to the gills with ketamine, bounces around from scene to scene and eventually steals Miller’s wife in a madcap adventure featuring a bizarre, arrow-shaped electric pickup truck. The character, a South African immigrant named Musk, played by the brilliant Stellan Skarsgård, leads Miller on a Mad Max-like car chase through Washington, D.C. streets.

For some reason, the film suddenly decides it’s a horror movie as Musk’s electric truck slices bystanders in half while plowing through city streets.

We’re supposed to believe that Musk, who has financed the president’s illicit election, is suddenly on the outs with an increasingly crazed president as Musk absconds with Miller’s wife.

There’s a backstory to all this, but another implausible one. President Krasnov, apparently thankful for Musk’s help rigging the election, invites Musk to take a knife to every government agency and to take charge of each of them. Musk happily obliges, cutting the budget of all of them and firing half of the federal employees.

The implausibility of this kind of action is too much for the most inane slapstick comedy, much less a film billing itself as a political thriller.

There is even one ridiculous scene where Musk brings his three-year-old son, named Lil X (short for X Æ A-Xii), into the Oval Office. Little X, apparently angry at both his father’s name choice and poor luck more generally, tells President Krasnov on national TV that he’s not really the president, and throws in an F-bomb while doing so.

As a movie reviewer, I’ll admit to enjoying some zany comedy, but when it’s injected into a political thriller, it simply leaves me scratching my head.

The movie is replete with inane scenes like this, and it’s all thrown together in a bizarre collection of episodic spasms of what the film’s creators consider comedy. We think.

For example, there’s the perpetually drunk defense secretary who makes war plans on the Signal Messenger app and leaves the entire B-2 bomber fleet exposed on Diego Garcia runways as a supposed show of force.

There’s a dog-killing Department of Homeland Security chief who loses her purse containing her official government IDs and $3,000 to a homeless man who uses his feet to snatch the purse.

There’s a health secretary with brainworms who fires all the CDC’s vaccination experts and replaces them with conspiracy mongers.

The Education Secretary is a pro wrestling promoter who declares war on Harvard University and pulls research grants from other private institutions, triggering a mass exodus of researchers to other countries.

As if imitating a Dr. Who episode, the film introduces an army of subservient automatons who take over the Senate and House of Representatives, and are opposed only by a ridiculously intelligent and beautiful young Black Congresswoman from Texas (of all places). We never find out if, perhaps, she’s The Doctor.

And then there’s the wackadoodle president, who makes Idiocracy’s Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho look like a genius in comparison and thinks his predecessor is a robot clone, declares Canada as the 51st state, and wants to annex Greenland.

In his longest of many incomprehensible conversations, this one to reporters in the wake of a ruthless deportation scheme set in motion by Miller, he says:

“Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they've worked for them for 20 years, they're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great. And we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not. And you know what's going to happen and what is happening? They get rid of some of the people, because, you know, you go into a farm and you look and people don't, they've been there for 20, 25 years and they've worked great, and the owner of the farm loves them and everything else. And then you're supposed to throw them out, and you know what happens? They end up hiring the people, the criminals that have come in. The murderers from prisons and everything else. So we're gonna have an order on that pretty soon, I think. We can't do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels. We're gonna have to use a lot of common sense on that.”¹

Film reviewers like me typically watch a movie from beginning to end. But when I heard this, I walked out, realizing that there was no hope.

---

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. Sorry, folks, but this, like the events more generally, except for the slicing and dicing Cypertruck, and maybe some other stuff, is real.