The writer of The West Wing and Studio 60, the director of The Graduate, and three Oscar winners bring their blinding star power to Charlie Wilson's War this holiday season and the results prove, yet again, that a movie isn't always the sum of its parts. Charlie Wilson's War is funny, engaging, and clever, but it falls apart in the final act and doesn't linger in the memory like a lot of comedies this year. Like several episodes of Sorkin's hit shows, Charlie is enjoyable while you're watching it, but easy to discard and forget by the time New Year's Eve rolls around. If it's approached as nothing more than an enjoyable comedy, it works great and Hoffman does some of the best supporting work of the year, but the final third of Charlie Wilson's War is incredibly frustrating, deflating what could have been a perfect comedy into merely a good one.

Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a playboy Southern congressman who picks his assistants based on how low-cut their tops are and pals around with hookers in hot tubs (that's how we meet him in a Las Vegas suite). Wilson catches a 60 Minutes report on the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and decides to get involved. With the help of his Southern financier, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and the CIA man in charge of Afghanistan, Gust Avrakatos (a nomination-worthy Philip Seymour Hoffman), Charlie Wilson stages a covert war, helping the Afghanis beat the Russians. Of course, we all know what that led to in 2001, but Charlie Wilson's War is more of a comedy of '80s politics and personalities than an indictment of a government who helped put the dominoes in place that led to 9/11 and the Iraq War.

You wouldn't have to see his name at the beginning to know that Charlie Wilson's War is a product of Aaron Sorkin. Characters do the classic Sorkin "walk-and-talk" (on Studio 60 and West Wing, half the conversations took place between characters walking side by side down a hall) and the creative energy of the writer's gift of gab drives Charlie Wilson's War for about an hour. It's heartening to hear adult dialogue in a comedy that's unafraid to assume its audience knows something about how the world of politics works. Sorkin's smartest move is that he never talks down to his audience, and it's great fun to keep up with Charlie's wheeling and dealing for the first two acts of the film.

In the true story, Charlie Wilson admitted that he had a great idea to help tackle the Russians by covertly helping the Afghanis but that everyone screwed up the endgame. Ironically, the same is true of the film about him. As you might imagine, Charlie Wilson's War needs to take on some serious, real world issues in the final act, and Sorkin and Nichols completely fumble the ball. Nichols, in particular, doesn't seem like the right fit for the actual war material. He's one of the greatest directors ever, but he can't balance the satire of the political world with the actual lives being lost in the Middle East. Every time Charlie Wilson's War leaves Washington, it falters, and a director with a better grip on both the satire and the tragedy of the true story of Charlie Wilson might have been a better choice. The final act of Charlie Wilson's War also feels bizarrely toothless, as if it's completely afraid to paint any of the still-living real people in anything resembling a negative light.

Like the man it places in cinematic history, Charlie Wilson's War has the best of intentions, but not the greatest of follow-throughs. The first half has so many shining moments, particularly in Hoffman's performance and Sorkin's incredible comic timing, that it's one of the better comic diversions of the season. But like Charlie himself, it could have been so much more.