liberals and reagon haters must love this movie!

First, I figured it was about time someone corrected the spelling mistakes in the OP's thread title. It's "Reagan", not "reagon". Interesting that such a fan of the actor can't even spell his name correctly.

I only read a few of the posts on this thread before seeing that a lot of it quickly degenerated into a fight between conservatives who see no fault with Reagan and have made him into a plaster saint, and liberals who routinely knock him without crediting him with any brains or talent. The usual right-wing rage-and-smear vs. the typical left-wing hate-and-sarcasm, befitting the OP's post.

If "liberals and 'reagon' haters must love this movie", does this mean that conservatives and Reagan-idolators must hate it?

To clarify my politics at the outset: I'm a moderate-liberal who didn't vote for Reagan and sees a lot wrong with his administration. (Conservatives who say that liberals never saw how bad the Soviets were evidently don't know much history, such as who it was who set the fundamental course of US policy against the Communists from the 1940s on.) He pursued some terrible policies, could be jingoistic, and was often wrong on the facts. But I agreed with much of his foreign policy when he became President. It's actually conservatives who were dismayed when they found out he really wanted nuclear disarmament. Most of them didn't understand Reagan any better than liberals did. Anyway:

I like (not love) this movie, and the only thing about Reagan that matters is that I think it's one of his best performances. He wasn't a great actor of broad range, but he was a decent talent. His problem was that he always wanted to play good guys. Yes, those were the kinds of parts he always got, but they fell in with his own preferences. It's refreshing to see him, in his last film role, playing against type as a ruthless crime boss, and he does very well by it. But, typically, he hated the part, because he needed to be a good guy. At the time this movie was made Reagan had signed to do two other made-for-TV movies, but he never made them because he went into politics.

It's also interesting that, in that way Reagan had of blanking out inconvenient facts, he always claimed that Hellcats of the Navy (1957) was his last film. Obviously this is false, but in Reagan's mind, the overriding factors were these: that The Killers had originally been intended for TV (though it went directly into theaters instead); it was a role he didn't like; and most important, of course, the fact that he had appeared with Nancy in Hellcats and so preferred thinking of that as his last movie. I don't know how most liberals or conservatives feel about this movie, but Reagan certainly hated it.