My Son Hunter Movie Review

Today I am reviewing the movie My Son Hunter. You can find the trailer here. Essentially it is a satirical movie about Hunter Biden and his laptop, which came to light during the 2020 presidential election cycle. This review will contain spoilers. If you do not want it spoiled, go watch the movie and then come back to see my thoughts on it.

Right out of the gate, it had a good hook. We get Gina Carrano’s character (a nameless Secret Service Agent) breaking the fourth wall to tell the audience: “this is not a true story…except for all the facts.” This did a great job of setting the tone for the movie. Right away we know this film is supposed to be a comedic or satirical take on real events and people.

I think one of the failings of the Conservative entertainment world is a lack of diversity when it comes to genre. Granted there has not been much in the way of Conservative film, but most of what does exist has been either serious documentaries (such as 2000 Mules, 2022) or heavy dramas (such as Unplanned, 2019). While there is nothing inherently wrong with documentaries and dramas, it was refreshing to see that a Conservative movie wanted to try to break that mold and have some fun.

Of course, a movie trying to be funny, does not always mean it actually is funny. Fairly quickly I started to get the impression that the filmmakers either didn’t trust their own comedic and satirical abilities or they thought their audience would not get the jokes. Either way, it seems that in the editing process, someone decided the jokes needed something…extra. That something extra came in the form of cartoon animations, randomly appearing on screen, and Looney-Toon style sound effects.

The first time we see a cartoon is after Hunter does a line of cocaine. Randomly, an anatomical, cartoon heart appears on screen, beating faster and faster and faster. Another time, Hunter makes a financial deal and cartoon dollar signs suddenly appear in his eyes. When Joe Biden makes a gaff by saying “erection” instead of “election,” there is a “boing” sound (I wish I was making this up). “Cha-ching” sounds pop up at multiple points in the movie when money is mentioned. I could go on.

I am baffled as to why these things were added. Perhaps it was because in post they thought the movie was not as funny as they wanted it to be, so they added in some zany cartoons and noises in a desperate attempt to up the comedic factor. Perhaps they were concerned that the jokes were not landing, so they added these in as a cue to the audience to laugh. Or maybe this was a genuine attempt at humor. Whatever the intention, to me it came off as treating the audience like we are too dense to get the jokes.

While I did not appreciate how they went about it, I can sympathize with why they felt they needed to add jokes in post-production, because, unfortunately, this movie was not that funny. I am not saying I never cracked a smile, but those were rare and an outright laugh was nowhere to be found. Most of the jokes were predictable and somewhat generic.

Prior to watching My Son Hunter, I had concerns that the movie’s jokes would essentially be a compilation of memes from 2020. Thankfully, it was not as bad as I expected, but it still seemed like it had a checklist of jokes that it needed to complete. Jokes tailored to a stereotypical Conservative audience.

• Stupid activist millennial. Check.

• Mocking modern youths’ shallow obsession with “going viral” and “trending” on social media. Check.

• “Mostly peaceful protests” as a city burns in the background. Check.

• The Left’s obsession with “feelings.” Check.

• Pronoun joke. Check.

• “Oh, come on man.” Check. Multiple checks.

• Hair sniffing. Check

• “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” Check.

Some of these were to be expected (how do you make a satire involving Joe Biden without him sniffing hair?) and even seamlessly woven into the dialogue. Others, felt awkwardly shoe-horned in. The second scene in the film, in which the character Kitty (aka Grace) attends a riot, had almost no bearing on the rest of the movie. It seems the only reason it was there was to check off about half of the jokes in the above list.

With other jokes they made even less of an effort. They did not even attempt to work “Epstein didn’t kill himself” into the dialogue naturally. They just said it randomly and even admitted they were doing so by saying it was “off topic” as Gina Carrano’s character breaks the fourth wall, turns to the audience, and delivers the line.

I will not pretend to be some sort of comedic genius. However, I am fairly confident that had they eliminated the checklist mentality and the cheesy cartoon animations and sound effects, then this movie would have been better. Funnier? Maybe. Maybe not. But having these things in the film actually made it less funny. Had they removed these elements then the good jokes and satirical elements that were in there would have had more of a chance to shine. Instead, they were obfuscated by the cheese.

I do appreciate this movie’s attempt to do something different. Even though I have issues with the execution of the humor, they decided to try something not normally seen in Conservative movies. I will give them some credit for that. Even with that credit in mind, though, the satirical and comedic elements of this film were just ok. However there were some things that the film did do quite well. For one, visually the movie looked good.

Throughout the film I found myself admiring the way they chose to use light and color. There were also many good shots and angles that clearly took some skill to achieve. Yet, at the same time, they showed restraint and did not go over the top. Yes, there were scenes with creative color and lighting, but they did not make that the whole film. Yes, there were technically interesting shots and angles, but they did not go overboard with them. They were used tastefully. That shows a level of skill and artistic ability.

In a similar vein, they also did a great job of finding shooting locations. They probably could have got away with mostly generic rooms or buildings, for the sets, but instead they clearly looked for places to shoot that would enhance the story telling while also making the movie visually interesting. Again, this resulted in a good-looking film.

I also appreciated the acting from the main cast. I did have issues with the amount of exposition in this film (more on that in a bit), but the actors did a good job overcoming the difficulties of a less than ideal script. Sometimes you watch a movie with a bad script and the actors cannot overcome that at all. Here, though, I felt like they worked with what they had and still gave good performances.

I thought the actor who played Joe Biden (John James) did an especially good job. Joe being a bit of a living caricature, it would have been so easy to make him ridiculous and overtop to the point of total cringe. Instead, I feel like they actually toned him down a bit from real life. Of course, he had his signature gaffs, but both the script and the James’ portrayal kept those from distracting from the overall story. In fact, James’ delivery of the gaffs was excellent. They were subtle and smooth, but not unnoticeable.

It also seems like James decided to forgo doing an impersonation of Joe Biden and instead went with an interpretation of him. This was a good choice. Impersonations can sometimes be distracting. I know when I hear an impersonation, I often get caught up in looking for the perfections and imperfections in it. I think going with an interpretation probably gave the actor a bit more freedom in his acting, while also removing a potentially distracting element, for the audience.

Hunter Biden was also handled well, both in the writing and in Laurence Fox’s portrayal. They made Hunter just sympathetic enough to make it bearable to watch such an awful person for an hour, while still not letting him off the hook for being a genuinely terrible human being. They gave reasons for why someone could turn out like he did. They showed how he never had a loving family and was mostly just seen as a useful tool for his father. Yet, we still see that he is a selfish man who has no real remorse for what he has done and who is only concerned about whether or not he will get in trouble. He mostly comes off as being a pathetic worm, which I think is fitting for a film that is meant to be satire.

Having a visually appealing movie with good acting is something even Hollywood periodically fails to manage, so the fact that this low budget film was able to achieve these things is good. I applaud the filmmakers for those achievements.

Movies need three main elements to be enjoyable.

1. Good story tellers (actors, directors, editors, etc.),

2. The right aesthetics (videography, lighting, costume, sets, etc.),

3. Good stories (screenplays/scripts).

While all these elements are necessary, some are more important than others. There is a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy is a good story. A good script or screenplay. Without this, it does not matter how good the acting is or how good the movie looks. At its core, a movie is a story telling medium. If it does not have a good script, then there is only so much good actors and good visuals can do to make up for that. Unfortunately for My Son Hunter, the script is its weakest point.

One of this movie’s biggest flaws was how much it relied on exposition. The filmmakers chose to focus on the foreign “business” dealings that the Hunter Biden laptop revealed. This could have been interesting. They could have created a film that took us along side Hunter as he made one or more of these deals. We could have “met” and got to know the various people he was involved with, in these schemes. Instead, what we got was a film that took place after these deals were made. This movie was almost entirely people sitting around talking about events that had already happened.

I think the filmmakers may have known that this was a problem, because they seemed to have made an attempt to disguise the amount of exposition. They would take breaks between talking about the various laptop scandals to show Hunter doing drugs or to move to a different location. Throughout the bulk of the film we go from a nightclub to a hotel room, to a government SUV, to the hotel room again, to a private apartment. Then between these location changes, there would also be flash back scenes that took place in various other locations. So, visually it looked like the movie was dynamically showing us a story. But all those various locations did not change the fact that characters were still narrating almost everything that happened. Even the flashbacks were mostly narrated by either a character or with text laid over the screen, or some combination of the two.

This near constant narration not only made the film boring, but it also made it difficult to follow. This movie essentially functioned as an info dump about Hunter’s overseas, quid pro quo, business scandals. In films (and stories in general), info dumps work when they are used to lay some groundwork for the rest of the movie. They do not work when they are the movie.

There was so much information being told (instead of shown) to the audience, that at certain points I found myself confused. If I did not have my real-life background knowledge of some of the Bidens’ scandals I would have been completely lost. It is bad story telling when the audience must have outside background knowledge to understand the story. It is even worse story telling when the audience has that background knowledge and still struggles to follow along.

Warnings against the overuse of exposition are abundant in writing circles. “Show, don’t tell” is the oft proffered advice for storytelling. So, I find it difficult to believe that the filmmakers did not know about this fundamental mistake. This leads me to believe the excessive use of exposition was a budgetary decision. When you take away the extras and minor characters, the cast is really only four people. I’m guessing they could not afford a large enough cast to properly show the story of Hunter’s foreign business scandals. Instead, they compromised by using narration.

Another storytelling issue is the film’s inconsistency of tone. Is this a mature satire? Is this a zany comedy, complete with cartoon animations and sound effects? Is it a serious commentary on scandal? Is it a morality tale about the consequences of not doing the right thing? Is it a heartwarming story of father/daughter reconciliation?

Yes.

It is all those things. Or at least it tries to be.

For the first two thirds of the film, the overall tone was fairly consistent. It clearly knew what it was attempting to be: a satire. However, towards the end it takes an abrupt turn. It stops even trying to be funny, and suddenly turns into a drama.

Throughout the film, we mostly follow a character named Kitty, a stripper who finds herself in Hunter Biden’s orbit. They connect and he opens up to her about his fears of the laptop coming to light.

Conceptionally, there is nothing wrong with Kitty’s character. She acts as a stand in for the audience. The use of an outsider who gives other characters an excuse to explain things is a very common, and effective, storytelling device (assuming there is not too much explaining, but we already talked about that). Unfortunately, despite being a good concept, Kitty’s character is poorly executed.

The problem is that Kitty is not really a character. She is a means of moving the plot (such as it is) along. She has exactly three motivators in her life, two of which seem to have been inserted into the film as little more than cheap jokes:

1. She hates Trump, because orange man bad.

2. She is stripper, because she is a dumb millennial who has to pay off student loans.

3. She has daddy issues.

She periodically gets backstory, but only when it helps initiate the next phase of exposition the plot. Since she is just a plot device, this backstory is utterly incohesive. She hates her father, supposedly because he is a lawyer. Really though, she hates her father so her and Hunter can relate to each other about their daddy issues. Later she proudly claims she learned how to spin things from her lawyer father and offers to help Hunter with his PR issues. But we never actually see her try to help Hunter spin the story. Why? Because the only reason she said that was so that there is an in-movie excuse for Hunter to continue telling her about the laptop scandals. Later, she abruptly reveals that her parents were missionaries in China (I thought her father was a lawyer, but ok, maybe he was both) and she spent part of her childhood there. Why? Because there needed to be an excuse for her to talk about the Uighur Muslims being persecuted in China and how that connects to one of Hunter’s deals.

When the Uighur’s are brought up, there is a major tone shift. Up until now, it has been a satire, but suddenly, it gets serious. Suddenly, Kitty grows a conscience (not for any real reason, as she has been a relatively stagnant character up until now), and we shift into a drama. The rest of the movie is a mess. We get a scene, in which she takes what she learned to the media and the Bidens all get arrested (here it slips back into comedy for a few seconds). But then that was all a dream…or something (it really is not clear). Instead, she chooses to keep the information to herself. The in-movie explanation is that with the corruption of the mainstream media the story would be suppressed, so why bother doing the right thing. But remember, Kitty is just a plot device, so the real reason she does not take it to the media is because she’s a fictional character, so that could not have happen in real life.

Then we get what is supposed to be a heartwarming scene in which Kitty reconciles with her lawyer/missionary father. Now, I am not a psychologist, but I think if a woman becomes a stripper, then her daddy issues may stem from something slightly more traumatic that “I don’t like his career.” And I think those daddy issues are going to take more than a single phone call to fix. But, again, she is not a real character. She is a plot device. The only reason this scene is in the film is because “Hunter and Joe Biden got away with it” is a depressing ending and the filmmakers wanted to leave us on a slightly happier note. 

All in all, the story aspect of this film was a mess. It seemed like they had a decent concept, but when it came to putting that concept into a script, they either did not have the skills or the resources to follow through. And because they could not write a good story, it does not matter that the film looked good and the acting was decent. As I said before, film, at its core, is a story telling medium, so without a good story, you cannot have a good movie.

I wanted My Son Hunter to be a success. I will admit, I had some concerns, going into it, but I also thought that it had potential. Sadly though, this movie ended up being somewhere between mediocre and outright bad. If we were talking a star rating, I would give it two out of five stars. It certainly was not as bad as it could have been, but it also was not something I would ever recommend to other people. Hopefully the filmmakers learn from their mistakes and do better next time.