Wag the Dog with Iran and Trump in Yet Another Satirical Movie Review
This version of Wag the Dog might seem familiar
By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV
Traditional Hollywood has met its match with these AI actors from Jeff Bezos’ movie studio, No Compensation Studios.
The ethics of AI acting is a subject for another column, but for now, you can sit back and enjoy the show as AI versions of Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Rodney Dangerfield take us on a comedy romp featuring a fictional American president with so many felony convictions that the American public no longer pays attention to his crimes.
Played by Rodney Dangerfield (AI), the president, known only as Trump, commits his crimes in the open with no consequences. This is because an anesthetized American public has become comatose from the consequences of smartphone addiction and general political apathy.
We’ve seen this plotline, of course, before, with “Idiocracy.” This film takes that cult classic one step further with a president whose babbling makes so little sense that news networks are quietly forced to hire teams of linguistic experts to interpret what he says and posts on social media.
An AI version of Rodney Dangerfield, donning a hysterical orange wig, plays the president, who so frequently makes fish faces that his wife scoops up their seven-foot teenage boy and escapes to New York, screaming as she races across the White House lawn in an East European accent, “It’s the fish! It’s the fish!” while puzzled aids look on.
Most of our attention on the president is spent on various chase scenes around the White House in an almost Marx Brothers fashion, as his staff sends in one teenage blond intern after another into his lair. The public seems fully aware of his proclivities, but appears to be too drug-addled to care.
The film, written by Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet, who was one of the screenwriters from the first “Wag the Dog,” is a full reboot.
In the original film, the president’s handlers invent a war with Albania to distract the public from a nasty sex scandal. In this one, the nation of choice is Iran, but the sex scandals are an integral part of the president’s persona, which is embraced by his adoring fans.
The origin story of this film’s version of the president begins in the studios of a popular reality TV show that features a New York real estate tycoon who ends each episode by taking delight in saying, “You’re fired!” to one of the contestants who spends the entire episode vying for his attention.
Implausible as it sounds, the tycoon defeats a series of obviously superior candidates in a presidential race that bears an uncanny resemblance to his TV show. His third-grade education will remind audiences of Sarah Palin, albeit with an added level of absurdity.
The film establishes his lack of intellect with flashbacks, such as a speech where he says during an early campaign stop in Pennsylvania:
“Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was, The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable - I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. It, it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch.”
For reasons the movie doesn’t try to explain (perhaps because that would be impossible, and pointless since it’s a farcical comedy), the public eats up this kind of stuff.
The movie is rife with these kinds of quick interludes, offered up mostly as an excuse to fire off Dangerfield-type AI jokes.
Everything seems fine for the president until he releases a series of increasingly bizarre posts on Twitter, which has been taken over by a maniacal and doped-up South African known only as Musk (played by John Belushi AI), who spends most of his time reminiscing about Apartheid to a captive harem of thirty women in a large media room. The room, filled with his offspring in addition to his harem, is full of strange mechanical toys that look like they came out of a Dr. Seuss book.
Musk loves his noisy environment and brags about it with lines like, “It’s a cacophony of cuck!”
Meanwhile, an investigative journalist, played by comedian John Oliver (as himself), doggedly points out the president’s obvious cognitive decline.
The public finally takes notice after reporters uncover the president’s aides holding him up in a meeting in the Situation Room and raising his arm for the press in a scene reminiscent of “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
As the president sleeps through various events, a worried staff, led by his White House Chief of Staff, a ruthless Florida politician named Susie Wiles, begins to strategize how to distract the public.
Spoiler alert: During the course of the film, we learn that Wiles is actually a man named Michael Dorsey, in a rehash of Dustin Hoffman’s “Tootsie” role. Dorsey has infiltrated the staff and found himself in over his head with the reality that the entire White House staff now looks to him/her to take the lead on everything from foreign policy to immigration.
It’s safe to assume that we will see a prequel involving Dorsey soon enough, but in the meantime, we get to see the AI version of Hoffman entertain us with episodes of harsh humor where he seems to thoroughly enjoy haranguing a clownish and incompetent staff for a litany of foolish mistakes.
In a twist to the original film’s plot, Wiles teams up with a Hollywood producer, played by AI Robert De Niro, who is tasked with producing a series of montages demonstrating a successful strike against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
The producer, Stanley Motss, convinces Wiles to skip the production and send real warplanes to Iran.
In one brilliant scene, Wiles says to Motss, “You do realize you’re asking a pilot to spend 37 hours nonstop in a B-2 bomber cockpit for show, right?”
Motss replies, in typical De Niro fashion, “Nobody cares.”
The plan begins to backfire when the president tweets an exceptionally incomprehensible tweet claiming that the attack has “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities. With the president already the butt of late night jokes, Motts and Wiles go into overdrive to solve the crisis.
At first, Wiles dismisses the reaction from late-night comedians as part of “Just more commie noise.” She is particularly emboldened by a pliant media, which, rather than reporting on the president’s incomprehensible tweet, repeats his “obliterated” comment as fact. But Motss convinces her that the plot is unraveling.
Motss tries to arrange for the Iranians to stage an attack on a U.S. airbase in Qatar. The Iranians are reluctant to do so for obvious reasons, so Motss urges them to send warnings of the attack through various diplomatic channels to avoid loss of life.
He offers the Iranians $20 billion in a denomination called a $Trump coin, which Motss convinces the Iranians is a legitimate form of cryptocurrency. The Iranians finally agree, and send dud warheads to the airbase.
Wiles gleefully says to Motss, “Look! They sparkle and everything!”
Motts, always without humor, replies, “The American public will love it.”
The plot fully disintegrates when someone in the Defense Intelligence Agency leaks a classified report that states that the bombing merely sealed the doors to the enrichment tunnels shut, which would slow the Iranian nuclear effort by a few months instead of ending it.
The movie ends with a fully enraged president traveling to a NATO meeting, accompanied by frantic aides who wonder what kind of embarrassment the nearly vegetative president will drop next.
It’s safe to assume that the film’s producers anticipate a sequel.
We’ll be here for it.
Thanks for reading!
This is how it really went down, isn't it? We're living in a cheesy movie.
Very amusing and so very realistic.
(I like how his orange wig is hysterical. I would be, too, if I had to sit on that empty head. lol)