Oliver Stone’s W is bombastic but boring, lacking the meanness and certitude of his Nixon and the conniving conspiracies of his JFK. Ultimately, because George W. Bush is still in office, a lot of what transpires in W. is still fresh in people’s minds – from the march to war with Iraq under misleading pretenses to the president’s choking on a pretzel. Had the movie come out a generation or so after Bush left office, it might have been more successful; as it is, we learn virtually nothing about the man or his policies that we didn’t already know.

To be fair, one thing that separates Bush as a public figure from that of, say, Richard Nixon is that Nixon was just more vicious and angry, whereas Bush is just a clueless dolt who leans too heavily on others to tell him what to do. And although it’s true that many of Bush’s policies have been a complete disaster, Stone doesn’t concentrate on their effect on the average person, choosing instead to methodically chronicle Bush’s career, from college screwup to presidential screwup.

The movie might have worked better if there was a mystery to solve; for example, JFK had the whole was-there-a-second-assassin thing going for Jim Garrison to look into. So what does W. give us? Nothing new, just the same round table of yes men and warmongers surrounding Bush, successfully imploring him to make this decision or that to further their own agenda. No mystery there; we’ve seen it all before, and in real time.

Josh Brolin is excellent as Bush himself, though. He may not look exactly like W, but he has the voice and the facial nuances down pat, so he really owned the part. It’s not easy to play a public figure when you yourself don’t really look like him, because you have to rely on your mannerisms and tics to draw attention away from the obvious incongruous physical appearance. Brolin’s Bush is never really morally conflicted, never appears to have a crisis of conscience, which is pretty much how he’s perceived now, anyway. Brolin does do an exemplary job of illustrating Junior’s conflict with his dad, the former president; seems younger brother Jeb was the favored sibling and was being groomed to follow in his dad’s footsteps, while little Georgie was perpetually drunk, stoned, and chasing the women.

In fact, much of the cast does a game job, particularly Richard Dreyfus in a remember-me? role as Vice President Cheney, reining in the scowling and grimacing to simply put forth his own vision of how things should be. James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn, as George and Barbara Bush, are also spot on, as is Toby Jones (a Brit) as Karl Rove, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, and Bruce McGill as George Tenet. The latter two, incidentally, captured the essence of their characters perfectly – Powell as the stalwart soldier who’s cowed into fibbing to the UN, and Tenet as the CIA head who was sure that the yellowcake information was a slam dunk.

Worthy of special recognition is Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush. Banks is beautiful, better looking than the real Laura Bush ever has been, but she applies a sort of delicate insistence to George when she disagrees with him, somehow separating herself from most political wives. Her small-town-librarian attitude gently counterbalances Bush’s arrogant frat-boy entitlement outlook, just as it does in real life.

Of the multicharacter cast, though, there was one negative standout – Thandie Newton as a listless Condoleeza Rice. Newton’s not given much to say, but she comes off more simpering and useless than I would have imagined; she seems more like a servant than anything else, there merely to prop up her boss. Which, I understand, is one perspective that might be rooted in reality, at least a little, but Newton’s coquettish grinning merely made her part of the background, rather than the major player the real-life Condi is/was. Rice in real life, though capable of making tragically terrible decisions, is at least extroverted enough to hold her own with the president. Here, the oversized belt buckles on some of the Texan high rollers had more verve and personality.

The bottom line is that W. is too shallow and too narrowly focused to be more than of passing interest. It’s a shame, because there’s a plethora of issues that could have been explored further, including how Bush’s poor decisions led to direct suffering on the part of the American people. But it just might be that not enough time has passed (indeed, none at all) for sound, objective judgment to be passed as to the ultimate legacy and character of the 43rd president.

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