Memorandum
TO: Kevin Costner
FROM: The Public
RE: Thirteen Days/Future Work
Kevin. Please. No more films requiring an accent or dialect. You suck at them, and your Boston accent as special advisor to the President Kenneth O'Donnell is atrocious.
Actually, while we are at it, so is Thirteen Days, a historically inept (and not quite accurate) drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis told through the eyes of O'Donnell (who most agree was more a fetcher for than a policy force with the Kennedys see John Dean on Thirteen Days). While it is not unreasonable to inflate the involvement of a tertiary character in historical drama, why they would choose the flat O'Donnell is beyond me. As written in Thirteen Days and played by Costner, O'Donnell has the political instincts and temperment of an eight grader. He is a chump and an amateur. His primary motivation sems to be to have the Kennedys (as played by Bruce Greenwood and Stephen Culp) like him.
Blocky, uniform, anti-climactic, and fatuous (it sometime uses black-and-white in reverence to Camelot), ignore this lame real life "thriller." The only thing that recommends it is Greenwood, who does a decent job conveying President Kennedy's angst and his sense of isolation. Conversely, Culp's Bobby Kennedy is portrayed as borderline stupid with impulse control issues. Grade: D+. Instead, see The Missiles of October
