Mark Reviews Movies: HOT AIR

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2019

No stranger to portraying and revealing the insecurities of characters with oversized egos, Steve Coogan plays a right-wing radio host in Hot Air. This fact is almost enough of a selling point for the movie, although that would suggest that the movie is actually about Coogan's character.

Instead, screenwriter Will Reichel makes it about Coogan's Lionel Macomb, a blowhard who daily attacks "coastal elites" while living the high-life in New York City, and his relationship with an estranged niece, who arrives at the professional ranter's luxurious apartment after her mother, Lionel's sister, ends up in rehab again. Tess (Taylor Russell), the 16-year-old niece, obviously disagrees with her uncle's politics and attitude. When he isn't treating his niece as a representative of her supposedly misguided generation, Lionel is just annoyed that he feels forced to worry about another person.

Obviously, these two will learn a lot about and from each other over the course of the story. Most of that sympathy, though, is focused on Lionel, painting him as a poor, wounded soul, whose outlook on life might have been completely different if he felt as if anyone actually cared about him.

Watching director Frank Coraci's movie, one can't help but think of Lionel's real-world corollaries, especially since Reichel makes some indirect but obvious references to the current political landscape. Maybe it's unfair, but finding sympathy for someone like Lionel, who publicly and privately displays no such care for anyone or anything but himself and his own misery, feels like a losing proposition.

It's not simply that, though. The movie itself is tonally off-key, reducing its characters to agents of feel-good change and approaching that change with a sappy form of psychoanalysis. Coogan is quite good here, especially when he has to fume through one of Reichel's many political monologues. Russell is also good, although Tess and other characters' counter-arguments are less specific and don't have the verve of Lionel's speeches. Neve Campbell is also solid as Lionel's publicist/girlfriend, who loves him for unknowable but, just from her performance, convincing-enough reasons.

Hot Air is mostly toothless—as a dissection of figures like Lionel, as a political comedy, as drama about these pained people, as a message of unity in divisive times. A movie such as this might get away with a couple of those shortcomings—definitely not all of them.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products