Joan Allen wants to become the first chick a heartbeat away from the Oval in The Contender, a movie that will make you love our current presidential candidates for all the ways in which they are less annoying than this movie's characters.

Senator Laine Hanson (Allen) is (1) a recent party switch-er who is (2) a publicly declared atheist that (3) started sleeping with her now-husband back when he was her campaign manager and still married to someone else. (Reasons one, two and three why she would never, ever be on anyone's short list for anything.) Despite her many and obvious problems as an appointee, President Evans (Jeff Bridges) picks her to replace a dead vice president. He hopes the appointment of a woman will provide him with a legacy. Oh boy, will it ever. In addition to those public problems that any presidential staffer with a search engine would have discovered and pointed out long before Hanson's name was even whispered, Hanson is also accused of having engaged in an orgy as while in college. And I thought not paying your nanny's FICA could put a damper on the nomination process. 

Republican Congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman, who might as well have horns and a tail considering his character's lack of subtly) bitterly hates the president because of something that happened in Hartford. (Which Hartford or what the situation was where two presidential candidates of different parties would be facing off electorally-speaking in a single city, I don't know.) Runyon also bitterly hates Hanson because she switched parties and because she's liberal. (To which I say "well, duh." A party switcher would never be a good candidate if the party she switched from was the party holding the Congress and for someone who is as left-wing as Hanson to have even been a Republican in the first place is just weird.)

Runyon sets out to destroy Hanson and hopes to replace her with an old friend, Virginia Gov. Jack Hathaway (William Petersen). Hathaway was the possible first choice for Veep after some heroics in the opening scene-though he also possesses a certain shifty-eyed screwiness.

For all that it is a political thriller, The Contender knows nothing about politics. From the first frame to the final tone-deaf speech, nothing rings true to the way the political game is played in this country. The movie tries for a jaded, insider feel but the cynicism is in all the wrong places, as is the idealism. Looking at politics in The Contender is like looking at a landscape in a painting where the sky is painted orange, the sun painted green and all the vegetation is purple. The colors are all wrong: liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican-none of the movie's political hues are found in nature.

What it lacks in reality, The Contender makes up for in volume. No speech, no politician, no behind-the-scenes maneuver approaches anything remotely subtle. Every statement is a declaration of war and every statement is shouted at the top of somebody's lungs. Runyard sees himself as some sort of crusader for morality. Hanson believes herself a crusader for, I don't know, women's rights or equality or something. Neither has a decent speechwriter. 

The one character given anything like depth is Democratic Congressman Webster (Christian Slater). He dislikes Hanson for what the movie thinks are good hearted but wrong-headed ideas. (He distrusts her party-switching and thinks her ideas are too conservative-though she never espouses a position to the right of Ted Kennedy.) Webster seems set to be the movie's moral center-he's a young congressman who wants to act out of , ha ha, conscience. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie, Webster and his scruples are forgotten.

Though The Contender is partisan to the point of shrillness, its strident-and somewhat confusing--political philosophy is not half so annoying as the ham-fisted way it delivers the message. The movie ignores the tribal warfare the two parties have engaged in ever since they stopped literally shooting at each other in Appomattix and acts as though the current climate was a spontaneous creation. The final screen dedicates the movie "To Our Daughters." But what exactly is being dedicated? 

Watching The Contender is like reading a report about European history that was written based on a trip to Epcot Center.