As a John Sayles fan, it pains me to have to tell all of you that his latest film, Silver City, just isn't that good. Compared to typical Hollywood fare, it's happily mediocre, but ranked against the best of Sayles' canon (Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Men with Guns), Silver City falls well short.

It's pretty easy to determine where the movie screws up, and that's with the storyline involving Colorado gubernatorial candidate "Dickie" Pilager (Chris Cooper). Pilager is the dimwitted scion of an influential family who spent a good deal of his youth screwing around before getting groomed for a run at the governor's mansion (sound like anyone we know?) Pilager is almost more George W. Bush than Bush himself, though without even the latter's ability to work a crowd. Richard Dreyfuss plays Chuck Raven, the Karl Rove knock-off, who is trying to ferret out the person(s) responsible for the inopportune appearance of a corpse at a Pilager photo-op. To this end, he hires Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston), a disgraced ex-reporter turned investigator who sets out to discover the body's identity and how it came to end up at the end of Pilager's fishing line.

Along the way, O'Brien runs into the usual assortment of idiosyncratic Sayles characters (Daryl Hannah stands out as Maddy, Pilager's black sheep stoner sister, while Miguel Ferrer puts in a feisty appearance as a far right-wing talk show host). As he tracks down the various clues, O'Brien uncovers the financial ties between the Pilager clan and Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), CEO of a giant multinational. He's also compelled to look into a housing development with suspicious ties to Benteen and illegal migrant labor practices. The murder mystery angle plays out with the governor's campaign as a backdrop, and Dickie himself pops up every so often to cut loose with a few choice malapropisms.

And there's the problem. Taken solely as a story about greed and hapless immigrants exploited by heartless capitalists, Silver City would've played more to Sayles' strengths: sympathy for the working man, deeply personal storylines, and the exploitation of both mankind and nature. But that's not his agenda, as Sayles is obviously on a mission to work his "Bush is a moron" stance into the film as well, and this provides the film with its weakest moments.