I like a good comedy when it’s done right but sometimes caution is the better side of things when it comes to making movies. Someone came up with the premise that is featured in this film and it didn’t make me laugh at all. It made me scratch my head saying “Why was this movie made”? That’s sometimes the case with Hollywood or even indie studios. They think they have a good idea, but it turns out it’s not. That’s the case unfortunately for Rumours.

The premise of this film is this. It’s a group of world leaders from 7 of the most powerful free nations on Earth Canada, The United States, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom/Great Britain meet for a global summit to draft a statement on the state of the world as they see it. They are known as the G7. Seven of the most powerful free nations in the world.  While in the process of drafting their statement, they notice it’s getting late/dark and they’re all alone at a gazebo. In the wooded area that they’re in they start to see some odd things occurring. This is out of the ordinary for these so-called world leaders.

All the world leaders are portrayed by a number of good character actors including Charles Dance as the President of the United States,  Takehiro Hira as the Prime Minister of Japan, and Nikki Amuka-Bird as the Prime Minister of The United Kingdom/Great Britain among others.  Denis Menocget as the President of France gives one of the funnier performances of the bunch. They’re all self-referential, but he’s my favorite of them all.

The biggest star in the cast is Cate Blanchett as the German Prime Minister. She is supposed to resemble Angela Dorothea Merkel who was the Prime Minister from 2005-2021. Other than Tar in recent years Blanchett hadn’t taken her career seriously. Taking roles in this and Borderlands doesn’t help her Oscar-winning reputation very much. Sometimes actors want to branch out into various genres, but these are a little much for this incredible actress. Film fans have come to love and appreciate her roles in The Lord of the Rings Franchise, The Aviator as Kathryn Hepburn, and her two films where she portrayed Queen Elizabeth the 1st. She is a prolific actress I want to see in Oscar-contending films. Not movies like this one or Borderlands based on the video game franchise that sat on a shelf for 2 years. She can do better.

I’ve seen self-referential films involving politics before. Dr Strangelove and The Death of Stalin both come to mind. They had a way of making me laugh whereas this one did not. I guess this one seems a little too close to home for me because Dance’s character looks a little too much like Joe Biden, and at one point he nodded off in the process of drafting the statement for the world. With the US election around the corner, I don’t need another reminder of Biden’s old age and so forth. This film just hit at the wrong time for me. The other thing is it makes these world leaders come across as incompetent idiots. That’s not fun for me to watch in a movie.

There is a threat to the Seven that seemed a little too goofy for my liking. Undead bodies threaten the group while also being lost in a literal fog. The fog is very thick and it causes the group problems. It’s their own insecurities that are the real problems within the group though. Subplots involving past romantic relationships and anxiety about being the leader of a country crop up amongst the group. There is an undercurrent of these people not being fit for these positions of power that I noticed in this film. I didn’t need that. I know what the filmmakers, Guy Madden,  Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson were going for. It just wast for me that’s all. It may be for others and that is fine for them.

Rumours was trying to be a satire on the incompetence of the leaders of the free world. It was a little too close to home for me as an American seeing the portrayal by Dance as the President of the United States. I wasn’t ready for this kind of humor. In fact, I didn’t laugh once at this film even when it got extremely obscure. Cate Blanchett is one of my favorite actresses.  I want to see her do more films like Blue Jasmine or Carol instead of these types of movies where she’s not taking the craft of acting so seriously. There is a place for that, I completely understand. I just wasn’t into her in this movie, that’s all. The filmmakers were going for a certain blend of comedy in this film. I just wasn’t laughing and because of that, this movie wasn’t for me.

1 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen