W is a remarkable and historic film in two ways. First, Oliver Stone began making it (based on a partially completed script) only nine months ago. Secondly, it would not have found financing if not for some Chinese investors. For those reasons alone it represents an entirely new era of film-making: Hollywood (or Chollywood, perhaps), retooled to work at YouTube speed.

Alas, in most other respects, Stone’s biopic of George W. Bush, to go on release in the US next Friday – with a release scheduled for November 7 in Britain – is a disappointment and might have been better off on cable television as a mini-series.

The film is certainly ambitious: it sets out to tell the life story of Bush from his days as a drunken Texan up until the point in 2004 when he had invaded Iraq but found no WMDs. The task of shoehorning all of this into a couple of hours however gets the better of Stone. Even as it jumps around in time, the script does not outmanoeuvre the audience enough to make them forget that they know what happens next. The satire is barely savage or clever enough to make up for the predictability.

Josh Brolin does a fine impression as Bush, but that is all it ever feels like: an impression. Richard Dreyfuss fares better with Dick Cheney, who gets most of the best lines, whether it is using a ham sandwich to explain the “One Percent Doctrine” or declaring that Iraq should be invaded for its oil. (“Nobody will f*** with us ever again!” he snarls.) Other characters, such as Thandie Newton’s Condoleezza Rice, would be better off in skits on the television show Saturday Night Live.

On the question of fairness: the rebirth of Bush as an Evangelical Christian is treated with respect, but in other scenes he is ridiculed – such as when he is offering a free T-shirt to a veteran who has been horribly maimed.

As much as Stone strives to explain the motivation of Bush as being mainly about his issues with “poppy” (Bush Snr), by the unsatisfying final scene you do not feel as though you know the 43rd President any better than you did when you first walked into the cinema.

Indeed, in the final scene, Bush seems to be imploding amid the fiasco in Iraq. In reality, he won another term. Which suggests that, for all his research, Stone never really understood the man.

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