It’s on par with Don’t Worry Darling for being one of the most talked-about cinematic events of the fall, but just how bad is Goonies star Robert Davi’s film My Son Hunter?
On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and returning co-host Kelly Weill review the biopic of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
“It’s got legs on Don’t Worry Darling,” Weill says. “I think I fell into some kind of brain fog while watching it.”
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According to Sommer, My Son Hunter is, “as folks might imagine, not a positive take on Hunter Biden.” The setup, he says, shows Hunter Biden in the fall of 2019. He’s spending the night with a sex worker and relating all of his dirty dealings with her.
“Then we get all these flashbacks to how the supposed laptop from hell revealed, whatever it supposedly revealed,” Sommer says.
The actors are a “mixed bag,” the hosts say. John James, of Dynasty fame, who plays Joe Biden, is “a pretty good actor,” according to Sommer. The problem, he says, is that “he’s nothing like Joe Biden. He struck me as nothing less than Kelsey Grammer in the mayoral drama Boss, in which he’s just constantly, like, growling. That’s just not what Joe Biden is like at all.”
Then there’s ex-Star Wars actor Gina Carano, who was fired from The Mandalorian over her “abhorrent and unacceptable” posts on social media and who plays a Secret Service agent whose hair is sniffed by Joe Biden.
“I have to say, absolutely horrendous actor,” Sommer laments. “She’s the one with the biggest credits in the cast but is probably, I would say, the worst actor in it.”
The film’s star, U.K. right-wing figure Lawrence Fox, can be seen “really leaning into the role, really hamming it up to the best,” Sommer says.
Along with salacious strip scenes and strange voice dubs, the hosts say it’s hard to know what’s going on and what we’re supposed to believe.
“It was across the board bad, but it was also so self-righteous it wasn’t really fun to make fun of,” Weill says. “I think the script was too thin so they had to pad it out with more ass shots of strippers and that sort of thing. Overall, I think this was a little derivative. The plot writing could have used a bit more.”
Both hosts give the film two thumbs down.
Also on the podcast, Ethan Chorin, Libya expert and author of the new book Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink, digs into the 2012 terrorist attacks and the way that Benghazi exists in our politics to this day, particularly on the right.
“Most immediately it was an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission, which is distinct from either a consulate or an embassy,” Chorin explains.
“It was basically just a bare-bones mission in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on the evening of the anniversary of 9/11. The attack went through into the early hours of the next morning. There were two locations for it. The first was an attack initially with about 20 radical militants on the compound itself. And then the second attack was on the CIA annex, a couple of kilometers away and very tragically in that incident four U.S. officials were killed; Ambassador Chris Stevens, Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty, and Sean Smith.
“Of course the attack has its own mechanics and history, but the attack morphed quickly into a massive American domestic scandal, which had really only sort of tenuous connections to what was going on on the ground in Benghazi at the time or in the region as a whole.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Weill reveals “the worst new thing that you’re gonna see online”: the new phenomenon of “Regime Democrats.”
“This is a new trend from folks like Benny Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, people who contribute to The Federalist, that kind of crowd,” Weill explains.
“What they’re doing is characterizing Democrats as a ‘regime,’ right? Using this language that implies that they’re autocratic, that there’s something nefarious about them. It’s really at this tipping point where you can see them really trying to meme it into existence. And I think it’s striking that this has taken off right after the Mar-a-Lago raid, when the right is looking for any reason to cast the left as the new Nazis, some kind of authoritarian force. This is kind of the language that they’re gonna run with for the next couple weeks.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
