All the President’s Men (1976)
All the President’s Men Movie Review
All the President’s Men is a 1976 political thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It is considered to be a classic, but to me it is very overrated.
It follows the two journalists investigating the Watergate scandal. This movie doesn’t work in my opinion because it just never made me interested in its story. It is only for the people interested in politics and because I am not one of those people, I found the film to be incredibly boring. And even worse than its dull approach has to be its tendency to assume that the audience already knows a lot about this scandal. I did not know and it was very difficult to follow because the movie never took the time to explain anything.
The characters are also very boring and underdeveloped with the two journalists being okay and their relationship is solid, but even those two are dull and weakly realized. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are solid, but because the roles themselves are weak, neither of the actors manages to become memorable.
All the President’s Men is well filmed, solidly directed and well shot with some really good moments well executed. However, this is not a thriller, it just isn’t. And I am really baffled at why people classify it as such because this is a drama from beginning to end. It has a couple of atmospheric scenes, but nothing thrilling or intense ever happens here. The dialogue is also annoying because, as I said, it assumes that you already know everything about it in advance which is so wrong on so many levels. It is also too long and dreadfully boring.
All the President’s Men is an okay movie, certainly not bad, but definitely far from great. It is important to see and has its moments, but is mostly a dull, annoying experience and such an overrated movie that did not deserve any of its Oscar nominations and not to mention that it doesn’t deserve its classic status that it has today. Such a disappointing film.
