David Gordon Green is as hit-and-miss a director as they come. He is also about as prolific as they come. Our Brand is Crisis is Green’s fourth film over the last three year period, coming on the heels of 2014’s widely panned Manglehorn starring Al Pacino. In 2013, Green saw two films open, the highly regarded backwoods drama Joe, starring a Nicholas Cage at the top of his game, and the off-beat buddy comedy Prince Avalanche. Even as a relative Green fan, I hated Prince Avalanche, citing its ill-fitting petulance and overwhelming sense of idiotic indecency as sources of extreme personal annoyance, but found Joe to be thoughtful and dramatically rich (if not excessively dour). Not to mention, it featured Cage’s best performance in years.
Which brings us back to Our Brand is Crisis, perhaps Green’s most commercial film since Pineapple Express. In many ways, the film is equally outrageous but has not found (and likely will not find) an equitable loving embrace like Pineapple did with the stoner community. To be sure, with a bafflingly low Rotten Tomatoes score (33% as of writing) and relative disinterest from audiences, Our Brand is Crisis will go widely dismissed. And that’s a shame.

While Green’s films in the past have a tendency to capture their target audience’s attention easily enough, Our Brand is Crisis could easily be his most misunderstood film. Far be it to say that the Bolivian-set political comedy is any kind of parody wunderkind but I’ll be goddamned if it’s not the year’s most astute political satire. In other words, I quite liked it.

As a storyteller, Green is never one to hover on the fringes of the story. He commits to the micro-idiosyncrasies of the sandbox in which he plays, first and foremost by unearthing what makes the more mundane elements of our world tick. In Joe, the ugly art of clear cutting is broken down to a science while in Manglehorn, Green got literal with this ‘how the world ticks’ approach by exploring the mechanics of locksmithing. Even Prince Avalanche was able to frame the triviality of painting lane dividers as a centerpiece to his narrative. We know these things exist and encounter them on a daily basis but we rarely ask how they came into being. Lane dividers may be a somewhat pedestrian example but I think it makes the point I’m trying to get across.

If Green had but one dedicated skill set, it would be to shine a light in places that we don’t often think about. To get us to ask how a certain something came into being. And though we all know the soft, seething underbelly of politics is pocked by barnacles of gross corruption and mass manipulation, we aren’t often witness to the “how” of it all. In Our Brand is Crisis, the how is both repugnant and devilishly strategic and Green deals a crippling satirical blow to the art of war that is politics.

Our Brand is Crisis frames the issue by dissecting a cross-section of real-life political strategist “Calamity” Jane Bodine, played aptly by Sandra Bullock. Recruited to aid the political campaign of unpopular former Bolivian president Castillo (Joaqium de Almeida), Bodine adopts ride or die tactics, doing anything and everything within her power – from churning the rumor mill to leveraging her candidate’s brutish punch-people-in-the-face-nature – to enliven Castillo’s undesirable polling numbers. Things get personal when Bodine discovers that the opposition’s campaign is being run by rival Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), a condescending bull of a campaign manager set with a form-fitting jackass sneer that only Billy Bob can pull off. It doesn’t hurt that their larger-than-life performances (inspired by real individuals) are backed by a rock solid script from Peter Straughan.

On the whole, Straughan’s script is playful, if not a touch pedantic at times. He’s just as comfortable quoting Sun Tzu as Goebbels but just as the scales begin to tip towards his passages becoming too cutesy and self-aware for their own good, he flips the table on the audience and mines one of his heartiest laughs. As Bodine and Candy’s adversarial cat-and-mouse game gets increasingly aggressive, Straughan injects barb after barb of comedic pitch and they almost all land. The chemistry between Thornton and Bullock is perfect – a hazy melange of sexual tension and fierce competitiveness – and their butting heads is the zesty lifeblood of the movie.

Rounding out the cast, Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd and Scoot McNairy all play political strategy welterweights with bruising hilarity. McNairy, in particular, plays off-center of what we’ve become accustomed to from him and it works wonders. As they all work together to groom the scuzz off their candidate, each must get down and dirty in what is essentially warfare against truth. The tactics are so filthy, so borderline barbarous that you’ll want to shower the scum off your eyes after watching.

There’s a sense of playfulness to Green’s lampooning that makes Our Brand is Crisis an enjoyable and engaging watch as well as one not devoid of meaning. The film takes its namesake from Bodine’s ploy to cook up belief in an impending “national crisis” and frame their man as the only one capable of confronting such a crisis. They brand their man, not unlike Coca-Cola or Reeces Pieces. Were I to brand Brand – which I shall – I’d give it a B for being blistering, blithe and bodaciously bonkers.