Possibly Satirical Movie Review of "I Love a Parade"
"I Love a Parade" is the first major studio production using mostly AI actors
By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV
The biggest news surrounding “I Love a Parade,” the controversial new release from Netflix, of course, is that it was created with an AI cast featuring Charlie Chaplin in the lead role as a bumbling, zany American infantry captain who an American president recruits to create a military birthday-style parade.
The president, played by an AI version of former Apprentice star Donald Trump, resembles a cartoon character who wears a bizarre orange wig that matches the color of his artificially colored face.
The unlikelihood of such a scenario should be enough to establish the film’s comedic effect, but, unfortunately, the plot runs wild with so many impossible scenarios that the viewer is unable to keep up.
Like other recent films from the Jeff Bezos-funded film studio, No Compensation Productions, this movie is a hot mess, despite its promising opening.
The film begins with President Trump viewing election results while his face is sopped with a potpourri of fast food and his aides are wearing hazmat suits, which, we later learn, are necessary accouterments because of the president’s ever-present stench.
The notion of Donald Trump as president is ludicrous, of course, but since this is a ribald, dark comedy, it’s a promising opening scene.
The encouraging start quickly turns dark as we discover that the president, who refuses to read staff reports and insists on PowerPoint and AI-produced cartoon characters to present daily briefings, has presided over a million deaths from an unnamed plague.
Frustratingly, we never learn why he is re-elected. This is especially infuriating given that the film has him losing a previous re-election bid, and, if I followed the haphazard plot correctly, the country was in recovery mode from his previous presidency.
The film then bizarrely cuts to a scene of his psychologically damaged daughter sobbing as network projections verifying Trump’s win roll across a television screen. She throws a copy of The Courage to Heal against a wall, then hunts for a butcher knife in the kitchen. We don’t hear from her again for the rest of the movie.
The film cuts to a scene with an AI-generated Pee Wee Herman as a perpetually drunk Defense Secretary known only to the audience as Hegseth, who sits in a meeting with his shirt off and his chest and arms brandishing neo-Nazi tattoos.
It is during this meeting that we learn of the idea of a military parade for the president’s 79th birthday. “Make it like North Korea,” Hegseth stammers while pouring a scotch.
When he’s questioned why by an earnest general played by the only live actor in the movie, Liam Neeson, Hesgseth hisses, “Because that’s how Kim Jong Un would do it, you idiot.”
The meeting quickly devolves into a drunken frat party of debauchery that would make the producers of “The Hangover” blush. But with the film’s darker elements now in place, none of it seems funny.
Neeson, fresh off the “The Naked Gun” remake, is hilarious as the deadpan general, but he can’t save this disaster.
This is especially true as the movie switches to the brazenly incompetent infantry captain assigned to design the parade route and lead the military parade.
The Captain, played by an AI version of Charlie Chaplin, can’t talk, so he issues all his instructions using large, empty folders with Trump’s oversized signature.
In another promising plotline, the incompetent captain turns out to be much smarter than what proves to be a deranged president.
The movie’s portrayal of the Apprentice star is so outlandish that one wonders what Trump did to the producers of the film to deserve this kind of treatment.
This version of Trump is a convicted felon and proven rapist, another slide from the film’s producers into a dark world that doesn’t fit the slapstick comedic themes of the rest of the movie.
It’s almost like the screenwriters are trying to create an impossibly absurd version of Sarah Palin, but their reach into preposterousness becomes too extreme even for the darkest of satire.
The movie continually feeds flashbacks of the presidential campaign onto the screen, including an admittedly hilarious scene where he tells his astonished opponent during a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants are eating a town’s cats and dogs.
His opponent, a beautiful and intelligent former prosecutor who is the nation’s current vice president, can’t resist laughing, and neither could I when I watched the scene.
Mysteriously, Trump wins the election anyway, despite an opponent who consistently outdraws him with enthusiastic crowds made exclusively of women.
The captain in charge of the parade, who is never named, recruits thespians from the ranks of the military to march in almost the opposite lockstep manner we expect in a military parade.
When Trump orders him personally to be sure to include tanks in the parade, the captain’s assistant, played by an AI version of Tom Hanks, asks in a Forrest Gump voice, “Is this so that we can make the parade road’s pavement look like they are in the South, sir?”
Handed a stack of empty, but signed, executive orders, the captain orders a few World War Two era M7 105-MM motorized howitzers to play the tanks, and issues one command after another in a surprisingly funny scene.
But, again, the hilarity doesn’t compensate for the trauma the celebrity president seems to put the country through. We laugh, but we mostly want to cry, as the feckless president drives the nation into a state of psychological ruin.
Eventually, the inept captain outsmarts the foolish president with a parade where nobody shows up because the vast majority of the country is, by this stage of the film, marching in the streets to protest an endless list of inanities and terrible edicts.
During the primary scene involving the parade march, the troops mimic Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks as Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son” plays on the loudspeakers.1
The movie concludes just after the parade as the fumbling president, slurring his words and publicly fighting for consciousness, yells at international leaders during a G7 meeting for throwing Russia out of their club in a scene superimposed over footage of Russian bombs falling on Kyiv.
As he stumbles out of the meeting room, the president splutters something about burning Tehran to the ground. The movie then fades to black with a final chilling scene.
Spoiler alert:
This awful movie ends with images of thermonuclear clouds rising into the air, thus ending the notion of comedy with a thunderous finality.
Notes
Image of tank by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Charlie Chaplin images public domain via Wiki Commons
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Footnotes
It’s worth pointing out here that the military parade actually did include the Creedence song as part of its music. A reminder of those lyrics:
Some folks are born made to wave the flag Hoo, they're red, white and blue And when the band plays "Hail to the chief" Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no senator's son, son It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no furtunate one, no Some folks are born silver spoon in hand Lord, don't they help themselves, Lord? But when the taxman come to the door Lord, the house lookin' like a rummage sale, yeah It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, no Yeah-yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes Hoo, they send you down to war, Lord And when you ask 'em, "How much should we give?" Hoo, they only answer, "More, more, more, more" It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no military son, son, Lord It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, one It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, no, no, no It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate son, no, no, no It ain't me, it ain't me..
It’s hilarious reading as a trailer nobody would ever want to watch. But here we are!
No one would believe that such a script was written, never mind acted upon. This would never happen in real life.