This is one of those cases where you know going in that you’re about to be exposed to some pronounced stupidity, but somehow you’re just caught completely unprepared about how terrible things will be. Now I can appreciate a good laugh, and I actually had a few while watching this film, but the moments of hilarity in An American Carol are few and far between. It’s all thanks to a ridiculous premise and poorly executed gags meant to offend everyone generally, but the very evil, liberal, Hollywood, elite establishment specifically.

Reportedly, filmmaker David Zucker went from once being a long-time liberal Democrat to born-again conservative Republican. This development seems pronounced in the last few years, which leads me to believe that Zucker is one of those people that “saw the light” on 9/11. Meaning that government knows best even when they’re wrong, granting civil rights to prisoners of war is an act of weakness, the only way to peace is with superior firepower, and America, as a certain group of people perceive it, must be protected at all costs. A lot of neo-cons like to talk about “September 10th thinking,” well Zucker’s screenplay, written with first time scripter Myrna Sokoloff, sadly demonstrates “2004 thinking.”

That’s the only reason I can think to explain why this film believes it’s so clever. Everything that this film exudes as standard operating procedure, and the way America should be, is everything that the country voted against in the last election. Beyond that, the film’s central character – one “Michael Malone” – a pastiche for our favourite rebel-rousing documentary filmmaker, feels like an oddly stale conceit to hitch a film on. Coming out after Fahrenheit 9/11, American Carol might have seemed timely, if not sharp. But in the midst of what should have been a great year for Michael Moore, his latest documentary, Slacker Uprising, was received rather coolly by the critical mass.

Even if the era of Michael Moore being the butt of right-wing jokes in perception of the left wasn’t over, this entire enterprise of pointedly making Hollywood the root of all of America’s problems has long since expired. I felt like the DVD cover should have had the words “PABAAH approved” stamped on it. “Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood” was, of course, the joke’s butt of a segment on The Daily Show way back when burning your Dixie Chicks CD was en vogue. The ridiculousness of PABAAH’s mandate has long since seen them shut up shop and gone back to quietly editing Hollywood films, they claim to despise, to fit a rigid moral code.

But Zucker didn’t get the memo. Other memos he didn’t get: The Iraq War was launched under false pretences; the majority of Americans now see Operation: Iraqi Freedom as a colossal mistake; considering diplomacy with America’s enemies as tantamount to appeasement is an overstatement; and seeing the application of civil rights as a form of mollycoddling is extreme. Don’t tell that to the ghost of General George S. Patton (played with surprising authority by Kelsey Grammer). He guides “Malone’s” journey through the perverse world created if the director’s vision of an America free of Independence Day comes to pass.

And since we’re there, let’s dwell on that ridiculous bit of nonsense for a minute. Abolish the Fourth of July? I realize that this is satire and you sometimes have to paint in the broad strokes and take things to their unnatural extremes, but this seems a bit much. Again, Zucker seems to be playing drastically out of date perceptions of the left, that not even people like Sean Hannity have the nerve to play with anymore. It’s an artificially inflated jab at the right-wing perception that Americans who were critical of their own government are unpatriotic and America-hating. But in its current predicament, are people like-minded with Zucker truly advocating that there’s nothing wrong with the way America’s been doing business?

Indeed, much of the substance in this film plays like a Sarah Palin speech gone wild. It’s all about the real America – the one in the middle where no ocean, or progressive thought, can touch. It’s the America where people like country music, watch NASCAR, and know the value of sacrifice. Because no one that ever grew up on the West Coast or in the Northeast ever thought about putting on a uniform and serving their country in the armed forces. They’d have to put down their French wine and copy of The New York Times in order to do that. Is this the game we’re still playing?

And I especially enjoyed Patton’s flashback to anti-war demonstrations in 1940 New York as reason why the advocacy for peace is misguided. I especially enjoyed it considering that much of the anti-war activity was lead by the America First Committee, a group that was criticized at the time for being anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. Not to mention that fact that AFC’s most fervent speaker was Charles Lindbergh, who once said, “[The Jews] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He also once inspected the Luftwaffe in 1936, and was given a medal by Hermann Göring.

Of course, Lindbergh said later about the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp after visiting, “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?” Well, we all make mistakes, Lindy, that’s why pencils have erasers. But in An American Carol, there’s no mention of Lucky Lindy’s misplaced sympathies, but there is however a cheap shot at Leni Riefenstahl. Now despite having made Nazi propaganda films, Riefenstahl was never convicted of war crimes and regretted her role in mythologizing Nazism, but it should also be remembered that she did more for filmmaking than Zucker ever could or ever will.

The final cheap shot in Carol I didn’t think much of was a take on Good Night and Good Luck called “That McCarthy Sure was Bad.” So is Zucker advocating that McCarthy wasn’t that bad, or is this some kind of professional jealousy; the left-wing movies are acclaimed, while right-wing movies are left to eat their dust. Call me kooky, but I think that there might be a bit of an inferiority disorder happening here. From Ben Stein’s Expelled “documentary,” which borrowed the methodology of Michael Moore that the right claims to despise, to this pedestrian social satire that already feels like a farce despite having only come out in theatres just three months ago, we’ve learned that the mentality of “If you can’t beat them, join them” doesn’t work.

As for the movie, it squanders a lot of talent in order to take cheap shots in what I assume is some kind of comedic revenge fantasy attack at all those left-wing wankers that stuffed the ballot box for Barack Obama and the Democrats last year. There’s definitely a taste-of-your-own medicine kind of vibe, but it seems odd that these paragons of moral authority would exploit Ground Zero and military families as a source of melodrama and so-called comedy. The odd part is that I think this thing could have come off funnier, wittier and just overall better; the building blocks are there. Instead it focused on cheap shots, stale gags and an underwhelming Bill O’Reilly cameo. I can only assume that Chris Matthews was unavailable – now he’ll do anything for buck.