Many people have already made their choice, voted with their feet and made Melania one of the biggest flops of all time – so I needed to know whether they made the right decision
16:20, 30 Jan 2026Updated 16:44, 30 Jan 2026
Mikey Smith shares impressions after Melania screening
Let’s get this out of the way: Melania is a stinker. You should not go and see it.
Most people have already made that choice, voting with their feet and making it, without question, one of the biggest flops of all time. They made the right choice.
Why? Mainly because it’s incredibly boring. It had a reported $40 million budget to play with, and unprecedented access to a person who remains an enigma to most despite being among the most famous people in the world, with backdrops dripping with filthy opulence and grandeur. Yet you feel very keenly every moment of its 1 hour and 48 minute running time. A good two thirds of that 104 minutes is spent watching Melania Trump leave buildings and get in a car, then get driven around in the car, then get out of the car and onto a plane, then get flown around on the plane, then sometimes get off the plane and into a different car. This is the very first thing you see in the film, and it’s repeated a good six or seven times.
What remains is a combination of fly-on-the-wall sequences of Melania meeting with designers about the 2025 Inauguration. The black and white dress and hat she wore should get a feature credit, because the film spends a lot of time talking about making fine adjustments to it. Also captured is the moment Melania is shown the paper invitations for the candlelight dinner she put together for the night before the swearing-in ceremony, as if she’s the world’s least flamboyant wedding planner.
She spends so much time getting into and out of cars(Image: Amazon MGM Studios)
And because the film crew were only with her for the last couple of weeks before the Inauguration, you don’t get to see any of the actual process of designing and making these things, just the almost finished product being presented to the First Lady-elect. There’s a lot of time spent with Melania looking in mirrors and saying how beautiful things are, and it’s extremely tedious.
If you were hoping for a behind-closed-doors glimpse of her life with Donald Trump, you’ll leave disappointed. He’s barely in it until the final third, and on the rare occasions they interact, they talk to each other like casual acquaintances rather than a married couple. The extended scene from the trailer, where she and Donald speak on the phone about his election being certified is either very poorly staged, or deeply weird. He boasts to her down the phone about the scale of his victory, telling her it’s a “landslide” – which is an odd conversation to have in early January, when the election took place in November.
Melania certainly appears to be a busy person, but if filmmaker Brett Ratner was hoping to humanise Mrs Trump, he failed spectacularly. The Rush Hour director, back from a lengthy hiatus following unaddressed MeToo allegations, paints her – deliberately or not – as deeply weird and lacking in self awareness. Her voice-over is omnipresent, telling the viewer how walking down corridor x made her think of the sacrifice of person or persons y with absolutely no indication she’d ever heard of the y before the moment she read the script.
She says very nice things about Donald, but gushes about her enormous son Baron – over footage of whom the song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” are played.
She spends a lot of time gushing about Baron(Image: Regine Mahaux)
A sequence where they visit Washington for Jimmy Carter’s funeral is talked over by Melania, who is preoccupied by the event falling on the anniversary of her mother’s death. She’s then shown visiting a Cathedral in New York later the same day for a “private moment” to remember her mother. Just her, the steadicam operator, the sound crew and presumably Brett Ratner.
The one moment of believable empathy shown in the piece is when she sits down, for some reason, with Aviva Siegel, comforting her and telling her leaving her husband behind when women and children were released was the right thing to do.
Later, during the Inauguration, she tells the viewer “nobody has endured” what her husband had in the last few years – presumably forgetting her chat with Aviva, whose husband Keith was at that point still in the hands of Hamas.
The endless needle drops of the most basic music choices are exhausting – from Gimme Shelter to Billie Jean – which we later learn is Melania’s favourite song – to, and I’m not kidding, Everybody Wants to Rule the World as they’re in yet another motorcade to the Inauguration.
And there’s a weird affectation that gets picked up about halfway through the film where Ratner chooses to mimic the old-fashioned film cameras her father used to carry around by slapping a grainy Instagram filter on random shots – mainly succeeding in making it look like the Zapruder film.
If you’re hoping Melania will have a ‘so bad it’s good’ energy, I’m afraid it does not. Melania is not Cats.
Melania is a bad movie, made by bad people about bad people and under no circumstances you should not go and see it.