FREE LUNCH EXPRESS: Lenny Britton's clueless, would-be satire of Bernie Sanders

God knows, Bernie Sanders was a political candidate ripe for satire, much of which has been made already -- from Saturday Night Live to Senator Sander's own campaigning. And while I have seen some pretty-close-to-worthless movies over the past decades, little has outdone the bottom-of-the-barrel scraping provided by FREE LUNCH EXPRESS, a new, badly-timed, would-be take-down of a candidate who is already long gone. The film's writer/director, Lenny Britton (shown below) comes off like some very low-end satirist who has all of two, maybe two-and-one-half, ideas about his subject and so beats these into submission and finally death over the course of 80 minutes.

Mr. Britton either does not know (or maybe care) that there is a big difference between Communism and Socialism and so equates the two, while making the face (and body) of the former into Joseph Stalin, a USSR dictator who has already been dead for nearly 70 years. Without a trace of wit, subtlety or even much actual humor, the filmmaker takes a few strands from Sanders' life and career and repeats them over and over and over until only a punishment-glutton would not scream "uncle!" after a very few minutes. 

Imagine a very low-rent Dinesh D'Souza making what he hoped would be an intentional comedy (rather than his usual unintentional hilarity) set loose upon one of the very few progressive candidates to have risen in the major political arena over the past century. The result: witless, charmless, worthless. And then some.

So Sanders worships Stalin and Communism. Check. He wants everyone to have a free lunch. Double check. He knows Vermont ice cream mavens Ben & Jerry (the naming of a few ice creams is actually the high point of the film's humor, followed by that of AOC doing a little bar-tending on the side).

For good measure, we get walk-ons from the likes of Eric Roberts (above) and Kevin Sorbo (below), while Britain's Malcolm McDowell (at bottom) acts as the film's narrator, trying his best to give the movie a little class and failing as hugely as does all else here. For the record, there are three Bernies included: the young kid, the young adult, and the old man (the actor in this role looks more like Ed Wynn than Bernie Sanders). 

For all its sins and stupidity, the film's worst failing is its repetitiveness. We get the same thing again and again. But I suppose for all those many right-wing nut-jobs inhabiting the USA today, this kind of movie will see like manna from that fake fundamentalist heaven they love so well.

Distributed via a company called Right and Funny Productions (a misnomer if ever there was one) and another titled Magnetbox Films, Free Lunch Express hits Video on Demand one week from this Friday, December 4th. You can learn more about the film by clicking here or here.