Sandra Bullock stars in 'Our Brand is Crisis'

"OUR BRAND is Crisis" is the Secret Deodorant of cinema - strong enough for a man, but made with a woman.

The movie was written for George Clooney's production company and the main character was written for a man, then handed to Sandra Bullock, a transaction widely held up as a gender-equality breakthrough in Hollywood.

So what liberated glories await Bullock, what exalted privileges that heretofore were reserved for men?

Well, you get a shot of Bullock dropping her pants and sticking her butt out the window of a moving bus - a sequence that indicates her career situation may have actually diminished since "Speed." In other scenes, Bullock can be seen falling down steps, breaking a chair, throwing up.

The latter is a famous symptom that afflicts those who visit high-altitude Bolivia, where Bullock's political-operative character - "Calamity" Jane Bodine - has been brought in to help right-wing candidate Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida) defeat a more popular, far-left opponent.

The movie is adapted from a startling 2005 documentary, also called "Our Brand Is Crisis," about a 2001 Bolivian election tipped by American consultants (a firm managed by James Carville) who used slick marketing tactics to help a conservative candidate defeat, for the time being, anti-U.S. socialist Evo Morales.

In this new adaptation, Carville look-alike Billy Bob Thornton works for the socialist candidate and looms as Jane's nemesis. He's a man with whom she has a long and contentious history, and he is her match in every black-ops way - just as ruthless, just as smart, just as contemptuous of the electorate's actual needs.

He pays an operative to smash an egg in Castillo's face, baiting the candidate into throwing a punch, an incident that Jane turns to her client's advantage. She'll position her man as the two-fisted leader ready to fight for his crisis-strapped country.

Jane persuades her staff (Anthony Mackie, Scoot McNairy, Ann Dowd, Zoe Kazan) to "go negative." Dirty tricks from both sides ensue - flyers of dubious origin linking candidates to Nazis, mind-control cults and the like.

The point of all this is to show how shallow, theatrical, cynical and substance-free national politics have become, a revelation that audiences will receive with a shrug.

Or perhaps a laugh or two.

Director David Gordon Green positions most of the mud-slinging as comedy: Jane gets drunk, fashions a slingshot from her bedsheet and shoots a load of poop at her rival's window.

The movie's flippant tone flirts with condescension, which Green tries to balance with attention to Jane's idealistic Bolivian staffer (Reynaldo Pacheco), but it's a too-obvious dramatic device.

Bullock, via sheer skill and comic chops, manages to make some of "Crisis" watchable, particularly in her scenes with Thornton. Both actors underplay, and we get welcome respite from the movie's frantic pace and personality.

While Bullock was making "Crisis," by the way, Clooney made a Coen brothers movie. Maybe the real male privilege in Hollywood isn't commissioning roles like this - it's turning them down.

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