I’m admitting it up front: I am very much not a fan of George W. Bush. Because of that, I was expecting “W.” to be a painful experience — which it was — but I will try my hardest in this review to judge this movie on its merits, and separate it from the aversion I have to its subject matter.

All that said, I did “misunderestimate” how terrible Oliver Stone’s new Bush biopic “W.” was going to be. “W.,” starring Josh Brolin as our 43rd president, is a scattershot biopic focusing on what writer Stanley Weiser deems to be the key periods of his life: his initiation into a certain Yale fraternity, his failed bid for Congress, his selection to be a part of his father’s presidential campaign, his rebirth as a fundamentalist, his decision to run for governor of Texas, and certain newsworthy moments of his presidency (such as the decision to go to war and, of course, choking on that pretzel.)

In the beginning of the movie, it seems almost like a “Saturday Night Live”-style parody movie, where absurdity is not just the backdrop, but is the joke. The president’s advisers all seem like human caricatures: Richard Dreyfuss unapologetically plays Cheney as a Batman villain and Thandie Newton’s Condoleezza Rice comes across as borderline unhinged, yet all the impersonations are somehow cartoonishly accurate. To Brolin’s credit, his take on Bush only really feels like an impersonation in the scenes where he’s speaking to the public, which seems appropriate since Bush tends to seem like a parody of himself in those kind of settings.

“W.” is part political drama and part tale of a spoiled rich kid with daddy issues. As a political drama, it’s barely mediocre. While it succeeds slightly more on the latter front, the whole “it’s not easy being privileged” thing got old a while ago. Throughout his life, Brolin’s W. tries to gain Bush Sr.’s (played by James Cromwell) approval, and struggles with the fact that Bush Sr. clearly believes that Jeb (who we don’t meet in the movie) is the one destined for greatness. As the movie goes on, the tone changes from kind of quasi-satirical to melodramatic, with ironic folksy music accompanying poignant moments (for example, a folksy version of “The Truth Goes Marching On” plays as they make the decision to go to war in Iraq.)

Because of the tone and its nonlinear nature, the movie turns into an endless and painful series of “what ifs?” Through it all, George W. Bush is portrayed as largely vapid, clueless and malleable, yet ultimately well meaning, which seems to take away some of his culpability for what he’s done to the country for the past eight years. The depiction of W. as a petulant, coddled manchild may have some truth to it, but I don’t think it’s the whole story; even if it was, it doesn’t change the fact that the blame for what’s gone (horribly, horribly) wrong during his presidency is his.

Unfortunately, the movie relies almost entirely on the appeal — or lack of appeal, really — of its subject matter over substance. Putting aside the high-profile nature of its subject matter, it just wasn’t interesting. It has its share of shudder-worthy moments, like Bush’s declaration that “God wants me to be president” and Cheney’s unwavering hawkishness, which are nothing short of chilling, but the characters and plot just aren’t engaging.

It seemed ironic that a biopic about a sitting president could seem so utterly irrelevant, but “W.” is just a kind of rudimentary summary of things we already know. We relive the bad memories, but the film offers no new perspective or insight, let alone catharsis. I had feared that watching this movie would be like pouring salt in fresh wounds, but instead it was more akin to kicking someone while he’s down. Ultimately, this movie didn’t make me feel any sympathy for George W. Bush (the only remotely sympathetic characters were Elizabeth Banks’ Laura Bush and Jeffrey Wright’s Colin Powell), but the seeming irrelevance of “W.” and the Bush administration itself was strangely hopeful. The events depicted in this film felt almost like a bad dream, and thankfully, it’s a bad dream that we’re all about to wake up from. No matter what happens Nov. 4, the cataclysmic Bush presidency is coming to an end, and that is something to celebrate (unlike this movie.)