Movie Title: Election

Movie Title: Election
Rating: 8
Reviewed By: Michael Stevens

Review:

Take one part annoying high school girl that wants to be class president. Take another part the student council advisor whose best friend teacher is fired after sleeping with the previously mentioned student. And finally take another part the teacher who is the advisor and add his extramarital desires and you get a rather funny movie.

Election is set in the land of 10,000 lakes (AKA Minnesota) where the advisor by the name of Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is married to his wife Diane (Molly Hagan). But Jim isn't satisfied by her, so he starts to look elsewhere. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is the young girl running for president, who also slept with her teacher Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik). That led to his firing from the school and a divorce from his wife Linda (Delaney Driscoll).

So now Jim is very annoyed with Tracy and doesn't want her to become the student body president so he enlists the popular ex-football player Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against her. Then to spite her parents and her brother, Paul's sister runs too. While this is going on, Jim is making an enemy out of the janitor (Loren Nelson), and making advances towards Linda.

Needless to say Jim doesn't make out to well in the end. The evil Tracy gets what she wants, but not really a happy ending. Paul does well and is happy, and so does his sister when she gets sent off to an all-girl Catholic school (she likes the ladies if you know what I mean).

Broderick and Witherspoon put in great performances in this Alexander Payne directed film that is based on the Tom Perrotta book. Payne also wrote the screenplay of this quirky comedy that ended up being rated R for all the sex (unfortunately you don't get to see a naked Reese). The rest of the cast consists of Phil Reeves as the principal, Colleen Camp as Tracy's mom, Matt Justesen, Brian Tobin, and more.

I liked how the good guy kind of got the shaft, but then got his revenge and what he wanted out of life, while his nemesis did alright, but not really. To wrap it up, I give Election eight couches out of a possible ten for the About-Movies.com rating. Goodnight, and good riddance.