My friends like to make fun of him (constantly) but my favorite critic, Roger Ebert, often has moments of keen insight. Consider his thoughts about Mike Nichols from his review of What Planet Are You From?: "Half of his films are good to great and the other half you're at a loss to account for." Bingo.
It is really hard to believe that the same artist who made such classics as Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate also made forgettable pictures like this and Regarding Henry, among others. It's as if Nichols has no ability to self critique his own work, unable to tell his great ideas from his really bad ones.
To be fair, Charlie Wilson's War is not a bad film, just a mediocre and forgettable one. In fact, I had originally decided to give it three stars, enough for a positive review, when I realized that the move failed the six-dollar test. It is not boring and will hold your interest, but it's not worth six bucks of your hard earned cash to see, especially when there are so many really good movies out this time of year.
Nichols purports to tell the story of Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a Democratic congressmen from Texas with substantial ethical problems who was (according to the film) the principal figure behind a covert movement to help Afghanistan defeat the invading Soviet army. This is apparently factual. However, Nichols uses too many cheesy cliches to set up his story. I can believe, for example, that he might actually hire only large-breasted women to staff in his office. I can't believe however, that said women would enjoy working there, or they would be one big happy, non-traditional family.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took the world a few steps closer to World War III, but you would never know it from the inappropriately lighthearted tone of this movie. This movie wants to be a comedy when it should be a smart political thriller. Wilson himself would also be a far more interesting character if the movie would take him seriously. The only way this material could work as a comedy would be as an all-out black farce, like Dr. Strangelove, but goes for such an easy going, middle-of-the-road tone that it's hard to believe that it's about a war in which thousands of people are dying!
To be fair, as I said earlier, this is not a terrible movie. There are two impressive performances from the wonderful Amy Adams as one of Wilson's aides, and from Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a gruff CIA agent with the unlikely name of Gust Avrakotos. The art direction is impressive at inducing an 80's look and feel, even though it's sometime unclear what year events are actually taking place in.
Although I know next to nothing about this subject, I had trouble believing everything portrayed in the movie because it all seemed so whimsical. This movie tells me nothing I couldn't learn with more reliability from a Wikipedia article, in far less time and for free.
Charlie Wilson's War (2007)