Hunter Biden’s life has made it to the big screen—or at least to the computer screens of anyone willing to pay $21.99 to watch My Son Hunter, a dramatization of the presidential son’s shady business deals and drug abuse, released Wednesday. Distributed by Breitbart, My Son Hunter is probably the best conservative movie to emerge from the right-wing media in recent memory.
That doesn’t mean My Son Hunter is any good.
Despite a wealth of dirty dealings to work with, though, the movie is more focused in dropping references to Biden mini-scandals that have had no effect outside the conservative media bubble than telling a compelling story.
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Still, it seems destined to become a hit among Donald Trump’s supporters. The ex-president has already given producer Phelim McAleer’s previous play about the FBI’s Russia investigation his endorsement, praising McAleer’s work in a nearly hour-long White House meeting in the first days of the coronavirus outbreak.
My Son Hunter makes clear early how steeped it is in anti-Biden lore. The film opens with Joe Biden swimming in a pool next to a Secret Service agent played by one-time action star Gina Carano, who’s ended up doing films like this after being booted from The Mandalorian. That appears to be a reference to a long-forgotten, eight-year-old allegation that Joe Biden swam naked in the presence of female Secret Service agents. And then, embodying the right-wing media’s most malevolent image of the president, this ersatz Biden gives Carano’s hair a deep sniff.
Pool scenes aside, the main plot, such as it is, begins with a TV crew interviewing two left-wing antifascist activists. One of those antifas, a woman named Grace, leaves the protest to go to her job as a sex worker (and a liaison with Hunter Biden), but not before her friend convinces her to delete footage of antifa beating up Trump supporters.
“I think I got a viral video,” Grace says. “I’m going to trend!”
“Look, most people are too ignorant to understand complex moral issues,” the friend says. “You have to withhold some things for their own good.”
That line is subtle compared to ones to come. In an extended gag, one of Hunter’s procurers expounds on her pronouns before introducing the next stripper. Later, after arranging to have exposes on his business deals dismissed as Russian disinformation, Hunter exults.
“It’s going to be wall-to-wall ‘orange man bad!’” he shouts with glee.
Right-wing British actor Laurence Fox plays Hunter’s drug binges with a kind of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas mania, introducing himself with bugged-out eyes and declaring that it’s “time to fucking party.” The movie even shows a cartoon of Hunter’s heart pumping harder as he snorts cocaine.
“My brother would never have fucked my wife,” Fox moans at one point, referring to Hunter Biden’s relationship with his late brother’s widow.
The acting elsewhere is worse. The film was shot in Serbia because of its Ukraine-like terrain and access to beautiful women, according to the filmmakers, and several actors appear to have their lines dubbed over in English.
John James, the actor playing Joe Biden, would be more impressive if you didn’t know he was supposed to be playing Joe Biden. As reviewer Ben Sixsmith notes at the conservative Spectator, it’s not clear that James knows how Biden acts. Instead, he plays Biden like a kind of glowering late-era Kelsey Grammer character, growling at Hunter to get it together.
“What kind of moron forgets to pick up his laptop in a repair shop?” the elder Biden fumes, only growing more enraged when he discovers his son lost more than one laptop.
At other moments, My Son Hunter goes for the cheapest laughs possible. A crack-crazed Hunter, whose real-life analogue has talked about his struggles with drug addiction, takes advice from a talking dog. The film’s version of Joe Biden is prone to malapropisms of the most unfortunate sort, as when he’s interrogating his son about the contents of his laptop.
“I need to know everything on that laptop that can ruin my erection,” the movie’s version of Joe Biden says, complete with a “boing” sound effect.
The movie draws on Hunter Biden’s real-life legal travails. The president’s critics have questioned his son’s business deals with companies in Ukraine and China. Hunter Biden is currently facing a reported federal investigation into those deals and other aspects of his finances.
The movie’s version of Hunter lays out this life story to sympathetic antifa sex worker Grace at the ritzy Chateau Marmont. An endless array of Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen cut shady deals, as the elder Biden takes a cut. Even as the film sacrifices its narrative to detail every foreign business venture the younger Biden was involved in, though, it appears to sacrifice some accuracy—a murderous Biden associate in Ukraine named Ivan Dollarevsky, for example, seems to be totally invented.
Biden’s supposed corruption is underlined by the film’s supporting characters, like Carano’s Secret Service agent and a mainstream media-hating Biden security guard named Tyrone, who quips that he’s the “black face of white supremacy.” Like Hunter Biden, they frequently address the camera directly, as when Carano’s character says she could be imprisoned for spilling the beans on the Biden family.
“I could even get canceled,” Carano’s character says.
In the end, Tyrone gives Grace secret recordings of Hunter ranting about his crimes. She tries to pass them off to a reporter for the Washington Post who is inexplicably writing on a typewriter and dressed like he’s reporting in the 1940’s, complete with a fedora.
Rather than pursue her story, though, the reporter rejects the offer, fearful that the story would undermine Biden’s presidential campaign. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani swoops in via DM to save the day, ensuring the Bidens will face justice and re-electing Trump. Hunter is arrested in his bathrobe.
Unfortunately for My Son Hunter’s likely audience, Trump’s re-election turns out only to be in Grace’s imagination. Realizing that Biden is president, she’s left to consider what it means to live in a world where Hunter Biden’s laptop didn’t change the course of history.
“Maybe in the end, the truth itself has become a fairy tale,” she reflects.
The most interesting story about My Son Hunter may be what was happening behind the cameras. According to the filmmakers, a lawyer for Hunter Biden and his associates infiltrated the set by claiming to be producing a documentary, filming much of the production in Serbia. That means there could be even more Hunter Biden content to come, this time from his point of view.
