A radical conservative US film celebrated by the Trump family is a commercial failure with a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Death of a Nation is the latest work of filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, one of the convicted criminals that President Trump has controversially pardoned.
- Dinesh D'Souza named Worst Director at 2016 Razzies
- QAnon - the deranged conspiracy theory that's sweeping America
- Child tells InfoWars host he's a 'f**king idiot'
The film, described by its producers as a 'documentary', compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln and equates Nazism, white supremacy and fascism with "The Left".
Donald Trump Jr tweeted his support of Death of a Nation and co-hosted a screening in Washington DC - but it pulled in just US$2.3 million on its North American opening weekend, from a wide release of 1032 screens.
Critically, the movie has been eviscerated, with not a single positive review on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and a measly 1 percent rating on Metacritic.
"If ever there was a movie that looked as if it had been slapped together in a couple of weeks as part of a quid pro quo agreement involving a dubious-seeming criminal pardon, Death of a Nation is that film," writes Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com.
"As a film, it is pure garbage from first frame to last, though as a document chronicling the devolution of conservatism from a movement of ideas and substance to little more than base trolling and fear mongering, it could well be of service to future historians struggling to make sense of our current madness."
"The meandering and insufferable Death of a Nation is little more than a greatest-hits collection of its creator's favorite neocon conspiracy theories, which frame the Democratic Party for the fascistic tendencies embodied by Donald Trump," writes David Ehrlich for IndieWire.
"Again combining the patronising hokeyness of a Michael Moore documentary with the credibility of a 4chan post about Pizzagate, D'Souza's latest touches on all of his favourite talking points: Liberal ideals are fundamentally antithetical to the spirit of the United States."
"To thoroughly unpack the falsehoods, rhetorical sleights of hand, goalpost shifting, and general bad-faith arguments would require a monograph," writes Vadim Rizov for the AV Club.
"One example will suffice: To prove that Hitler wasn't a 'right-winger' but truly belongs to the left, D'Souza notes that the dictator is often deemed right-wing because he's perceived as homophobic. (Well, yes.) But in fact, that's incorrect, because Hitler tolerated homosexuals in the brownshirts as long as they were good fighters; ergo, he wasn't homophobic, and by extension he's not right-wing."
Even critics who were comparatively charitable to the film's approach to truth and logic bemoaned how unentertaining they found it.
Frank Scheck at the Hollywood Reporter wrote: "No one expects, of course, that D'Souza would make a thoughtful, balanced or historically accurate documentary. But is it unreasonable to hope that he make one that doesn't bore the pants off us?"
Death of a Nation is not currently listed as coming soon to New Zealand cinemas.
Newshub.
