'Death' just a ho-hum mystery

DEATH OF A PRESIDENT — ** — Fictional docudrama; with English subtitles (Arabic dialects); rated R (violence, profanity, racial epithets, brief gore).

The scene described by the title of "Death of a President" arrives within the first 30 minutes of the film. It's pretty anticlimactic, and so is the rest of the movie.

Despite the continuing controversy over its concept — the imagined assassination of President Bush — this docudrama pretty much fizzles out. It starts strong but quickly turns into a standard murder mystery that has few surprises and fewer thrills.

The real surprise here is that such a film could be so ho-hum.

This British production is a fictional, what-if scenario that explores the possibility of a presidential assassination in October 2007, as President Bush visits Chicago, where he's supposed to deliver a speech on the state of the union, specifically the economy.

The speech goes well, but as Bush is leaving the building with his Secret Service escorts, an unknown assailant fires off two shots. Both shots find their mark, and when those wounds prove fatal, it becomes a race against time as the FBI and police officials try to find the assassin.

Filmmaker Gabriel Range (a British television veteran) uses existing footage, CGI gimmickry and re-creations to stage the events. And he and co-screenwriter Simon Finch use the material to take potshots at both the president and vice president Dick Cheney, who would assume the presidency if something like this really happened.

Also, the film's explorations of supposed anti-Muslim sentiments and human-rights violations in the United States are so clumsy, so heavy-handed that the whole thing feels like a parody. You may wonder if Range should have taken a more satiric approach instead.

"Death of a President" is rated R for scenes of violence (a shooting, as well as some newsreel footage of rioting, riot suppression and warfare), scattered use of strong profanity, racial epithets and ethnic slurs, and some brief hospital gore. Running time: 93 minutes.

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