D.O.A.P (Death of a President)
Director: Gabriel Range

For a small British psudo-documentary, D.O.A.P has become the hottest film this year at the Toronto Film Festival. Hundreds of people clamored outside a tiny theater vying to get in, and ticket scalping reached over $100 per seat based on sheer buzz alone. The film was so hot that extra security guards prowledl the crowd with night-vision goggles over piracy fears. There are over three hundred films screening at TIFF this year, but D.O.A.P is the only one where George W. Bush gets killed.

D.O.A.P starts with a simple hypothesis—what would happen if George W. Bush was assassinated?—and runs with it like a quarterback. In faux-documentary style, complete with dramatic music and tear-ridden testimonials, we are thrust a year into the future in Chicago, where an anti-Bush rally turns violent and the President is gunned down by an anonymous party. As the country scrambles to right itself after this traumatic event, the documentary chronicles how events unfold for the men and women affected by the killing: an Islamic woman whose husband is detailed, a Gulf War vet, an anti-war protester, etc. Also, President Cheney. Shudder.

The subject matter alone gives D.O.A.P a sense of exotic allure and danger, but the film is surprisingly tame, almost disappointingly so. The knee-jerk reaction from many conservative voices is sure to make the film an underground hit, but the film is careful to treat the serious subject with a respect that borders on reverence. It leans left, but not nearly as much as you might think. If anything, the film is sympathetic to the, ahem, late President, almost tenderly so.

What let me down about D.O.A.P was how little the film did with the material. Anyone with half a brain could see how events would play out in this hypothetical situation: speculative blame would fall on the Muslim man found near the scene, the administration would use the event politically to pressure countries like Syria and North Korea and expand the Patriot Act, etc. There is nothing particularly shocking, or electric about how things play out in D.O.A.P – it is surprisingly routine.

D.O.A.P is not a bad film; it runs with an idea with surprising skill, and creates an entirely plausible alternate reality with some clever editing and CGI effects. It simply fails to live up to the expectations of its own idea. There is so much more a film like this could have said, could have told us about the world we live in and how bad things could get. Instead, the film plays its hands close to its chest, focusing instead on a few individuals rather than the world at large, making D.O.A.P entirely forgettable.

Verdict: 68