Movie Review: Our Brand is Crisis

"Our Brand is Crisis" is a strange title for a movie even though there is a line from the movie when the main character who is a political operative played by Sandra Bullock determines that the only way for her candidate to win is to create an environment of crisis in Bolivia so that her aggressive candidate would be more accepted by the voters. Despite this fact, the title of this movie is rather bad but so is this movie.

I have noticed over the years and seeing many movies that one of the signs of a bad movie is what are called "filler scenes", where the director realizes that there are not enough of a story to fill out an entire 2 hour movie, so there are cuts to scenes of music and unnecessary action. In this movie, this happened about 5 times and some of these filler scenes (including Bullock's character mooning people in a passing bus) are just plain ridiculous. This entire movie could have been shown in about 1 hour and 10 minutes, rather than the 2 hours of boredom and pointless dialog that this movie has.

At the end of the movie there is a scene where Sandra Bullock's character puts a strange metal hat on her head which makes absolutely no sense. Also at the end of this movie when the election is over with a predictable result, Bullock's character decides to stay in Bolivia for reasons that are never explained to the viewer. The one thing I did admire about this bad movie is the 3 stars, Billy Bob Thornton, Sandra Bullock and Anthony Mackie and the fact that they spent probably several months in Bolivia which is a poor and perhaps dangerous country to live in; so many dues were probably made there to earn their salaries. Its too bad that after all this money and effort such a bad movie was created. There is a scene where a Lama is killed by a passing car which was in very bad taste and was actually offensive. Obviously the producers of this movie either forgot about or never heard of PETA. Why was this scene even in this movie? Was this suppose to be funny? It sure was not funny and was very disturbing.

Another very bad thing about this movie is the constant smoking of several of the main characters, continuing this Hollywood tradition of showing so many people in movies with the worst health threat we have to humanity. It seems we are a long way from a ban of all smoking in movies and that is a real shame.

This movie should be avoided.

Hollywood and Smoking: A Brief History


IMDB Our Brand is Crisis