Such a frustrating disappointment

Sadly Over-hyped

I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

THE PRESIDENT'S STAFF is an indie thriller, set in the White House and depicting a scenario in which the US President and a few allies are trapped in the Oval Office by booby traps on the doors and windows. Bizarrely, this was made in Italy, although on a single location it doesn't really matter. The only actor of note is Tomas Arana, familiar from his work on the BOURNE franchise. This one suffers from a laughable script which descends into humour and inanity when in fact this should be a suspenseful thriller; a shame it never is.

I could hardly get through 30 minutes of this movie and most of that time was spent marveling at the sheer audacity of anyone involved in a production this badly done. There is nothing redeeming about this movie. Neither the plot or the dialog or the one room laughable "set" inside the White House or the horrible, horrible acting have any redeeming qualities what so ever. A SyFy channel produced movie is comparatively Oscar winning material. If there is one word to describe this movie it would be "Amateurish", amateurishly incompetent.The production values and what passes for dialog are reminiscent of a porn movie - a badly made porn movie. For the first 10 minutes of the movie I literally thought I was watching a satire, some sort of comedy along the lines of "Airplane!" and it took another 5 minutes for the realization that there would be no punchline: the writers, producers and what passes for actors were indeed serious. I can appreciate a bad movie for the camp value alone but this piece of trash can not even redeem itself on that score.

I watched this for about 20 minutes with growing disbelief, until I could take no more.Films like this don't come along too often in my experience - there are four amazing things about this film: The plot, acting, and dialogue, which are all amazingly bad, lastly the number of people (presumably the cast) who've awarded it top marks have actually managed to achieve an amazingly good rating of 4.8 at the time of writing. This is totally unjustified - I'm struggling to give it a 1. I virtually never review films, but this one is so shockingly bad that I just had to warn people.I suspect it will become a case study of how not to write a plot, how not to act, and how not to write dialogue. Looking at the wall for a couple of hours would be more enriching then watching this.