DVD Review: Laughable ‘2016: Obama’s America’ Assumes You’re an Idiot

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CHICAGO – If the Koch brothers have proven anything over the last several months, it’s that money speaks louder than the truth. Facts may not be for sale, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be buried. At a time when more information is available to the general public than ever before, an alarming number of Americans are content in remaining blissfully uninformed.

The 90-minute propaganda stunt, “2016: Obama’s America,” banks on the assumption that audiences are idiots. How else to explain its crackpot corroboration of unsubstantiated gobbledygook masquerading as an incendiary examination of the 44th U.S. president? The film isn’t really about Barack Obama at all. It’s about author/co-director/narrator/star Dinesh D’Souza and his own warped view of America, which seems to exist entirely within an alternate reality completely detached from our own. Perhaps the man has a future in science fiction.

DVD Rating: 0.0/5.0

In D’Souza’s America, racism is a thing of the past, an argument that he proudly expressed during a debate with Jesse Jackson. Since “2016: Obama’s America” is built entirely on white America’s fear of “the other”—fear of Muslims, fear of anti-colonialists, fear of “card-carrying Communists,” fear of presidents with the middle name Hussein—D’Souza’s sentiments make him palatable to even the most extreme closet racist, despite being a “man of color” himself. With his laughably self-important professorial shtick, D’Souza has the posturing of a scholar but not the intellect. Since the majority of his film is devoted to a preposterously doom-laden interpretation of Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” D’Souza skims so quickly over his own criticisms regarding Obama’s presidency that he leaves little time for the audience to absorb them.

Maybe this was a conscious decision on the part of co-director John Sullivan (who helmed the equally inane Ben Stein doc, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”), since there isn’t an ounce of truth in any of his claims. To support his argument that Obama inherited the anti-colonial beliefs of his father, D’Souza points out that the president removed a bust of Winston Churchill, the poster boy of British colonialism, from the Oval Office. He fails to mention that the bust was scheduled for removal before Obama even took office or that another bust of Churchill indeed remains in the White House. D’Souza’s claims about Obama’s policies regarding Iran’s nuclear program and the Falkland Islands are transparently false and are immediately destroyed by the slightest bit of research, which the author clearly expects his target audience to avoid.

2016: Obama’s America was released on DVD on October 16, 2012.
Photo credit: Lionsgate Entertainment

D’Souza conveniently forgets to mention the 2008 financial crisis or the assassination of Osama bin Laden while portraying Obama as a careless spender and jihadist sympathizer. One of the funniest aspects of the film is how every member on D’Souza’s panel of extreme right wing experts are credited as “Dr.” Even the pull-quote on the back of the film’s DVD case is credited to a doctor, namely Dr. Ted Baehr of Movieguide.org, whose organization’s stated mission is to “redeem the values of the mass media according to biblical principles.” It’s little wonder that the good doctor has pointed his holier-than-thou thumb toward the heavens for D’Souza’s film, since it was distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures, which specializes in bargain basement dreck targeting conservative Christians (such as “End of the Spear” and “Atlas Shrugged: Part I”).

From its hideously pedestrian score and hokey editing to its hilariously staged sequences of dour scholars barking prophecies over the phone while being slickly photographed from every angle, “2016: Obama’s America” is the very definition of amateur hour. It makes Michael Moore look like Errol Morris and the Republican party look like a league of gullible lobotomized slackjaws. There are a thousand credible ways that a filmmaker could go about criticizing President Obama’s first term in office, but D’Souza isn’t interested in facts. He’s not a scholar but a delusional, Ann Coulter-type conspiracy theorist appealing to the most fanatical sect of right-wingers, a group that the Republican Party has apparently decided to court as its base. Liberals are bound to laugh derisively at every frame of this picture. It’s conservatives who should really feel offended.

“2016: Obama’s America” is presented in its 1.78:1 aspect ratio, accompanied only by English subtitles, and includes no extras, which is no surprise considering that the film was available in every video store immediately after playing for months in wide release. The entire production reeks of Super PAC money, which has been spent with the same sense of mounting desperation that Republicans displayed by blocking every piece of Obama’s legislation that may have actually aided in repairing the nation over the last four years. How else would the lobbyists in Congress be able to blame Obama for the America’s dire state, while assuring their special interest groups that ungoverned corporate privilege will continue to be granted? Just as D’Souza assumed that his audience won’t bother conducting their own research, the Republicans are assuming that their voters won’t bother researching their current candidate for president, who appears to change beliefs as if casting off last week’s outdated fashion. All that’s missing from this witless exercise in contrived fear mongering are the words, “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”

By MATT FAGERHOLM Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]