The Reel Review
U.S. First Lady Melania Trump takes viewers on a journey into the 20 days leading up to the 2025 inauguration of her husband, President Donald Trump. This documentary is directed by Brett Ratner (Tower Heist, the Rush Hour films), who, like Melania and Donald, was also a friend of the now-famous, dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
To call this painfully boring, heavily scripted, performative puff piece a documentary is a disservice to the hardworking filmmakers who make actual documentaries. For a creepy hour and 44 minutes, the tone deaf former “model” drones on about the importance of fashion and glamour in broken English which sounds eerily like a Saturday Night Live skit, especially when she admits to her husband that she didn’t see his election victory on television. A surreal backdrop of Trumpian gold gilt vulgarity, 80s pop tunes and inappropriately grandiose instrumentals round out the super weird ick-fest.
Amazon MGM Studio’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos paid $75 million for this grotesque North Korean-styled propaganda, with $28 million of that going directly into Melania’s pocket. Not surprisingly, the only thing we learn about Melania, in this dreadfully dull vanity project that spends half of its runtime showing her getting in and out of cars and in and out of planes, is that she possesses no emotion and no personality and has all the warmth of a dead, squinty-eyed pelican… but with nice shoes.
REEL FACTS
• Melania is the most expensive documentary in U.S. history, a box office bomb that made only $16 million from a predominantly older demographic of American white women (and unidentified patrons buying out entire theaters worth of tickets to empty showings). Internationally, Melania has been even more of a box office disaster – in the UK, the film made $44,000. South Africa pulled the film from theaters prior to its release due to poor ticket sales.
• Melania director Brett Ratner, whose Hollywood filmmaking career was ruined during 2017’s #metoo scandal, was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
• Donald Trump is the only U.S president never to win against a male opponent.
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