The point of the film, ostensibly, is to show how damaging America’s highly-competitive political nature is by applying it to a situation where the country’s people stand to lose a lot very quickly if the wrong person wins. However, writer Peter Straughan makes the fatal error of making the film almost entirely about Bullock and Thornton’s goofy one-upsmanship. This not only comes off as disrespectful, it avoids giving the audience valuable contextual information about the actual race — we have no idea what’s at stake, or what the candidates really believe.
Once the consequences of the election come to pass, we’re given a last-minute redemption arc that has Jane joining forces with a young Bolivian campaign volunteer (Reynaldo Pacheco) and his friends in a protest, and then later starting a career campaigning for Latin American rights. It’s the one part of the film that takes its politics seriously. But here again, the story isn’t about the people who are actually suffering — the people who have to live with the man they were manipulated into electing. It’s about Jane, the American, who at the end of the day still gets to leave it all behind.
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