The Dictator - sort of half a film

Well I know I said that the next review would be Skyfall, but after my Thursday evening football was called off last night I had a few extra hours spare and so I was able to fit in Sasha Baron Cohen's The Dictator. Cohen plays Hafez Aladeen, the supreme leader of the made up nation of Wadiya that lies sort of where Somalia should be in the real world. Aladeen is a mentalist dictator kind of in the role that Uday Hussein might have been if he had lived. He and his trusted adviser Tamir - Ben Kingsley - must travel to New York to deliver a speech to the UN about nuclear weapons and arms inspectors and all that jazz. So basically the film's that classic Hollywood story about a yokel who travels to New York City, except this time the yokel is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The film has a funny opening and a funny ending, but in the middle it feels like the writers sort of only had two ideas and are just padding out the minutes between the funny bits. The opening is a series of skits set in Wadiya that lampoon many of the dictators who have moulded themselves in the shadow of Colonel Gadaffi. These are funny scenes. One scene in particular involves Aladeen inspecting his nuclear weapons capability with the eyes of a retarded child; another scene stars an extremely sporting Megan Fox who plays herself whoring her body out to Aladeen for a horde of expensive trinkets. The end of the film has Aladeen deliver a speech in the UN about the benefits of having a dictatorship - which are all things that the Americans have already (1% of the population owning all the wealth, media controlled by a few powerful individuals etc).   But that's it really, the remaining hour of the running time is padding that they had to come up with to justify a feature length film.

Much of the middle of the film is full of cringe worthy attempts at toilet humour. There is a scene in which someone has to explain to Aladeen how to masturbate.  Yep - really. There is another scene in which Aladeen and his nuclear scientist Nadal have an Arabic conversation in a helicopter over Manhattan in which they accidentally hilariously slip in English words like Bin Laden and 911. Just imagine how hilarious that is. Plus there's all the politically incorrect stuff Aladeen can say, about women being inferior to men, Jews being inferior to Arabs and most other kinds of stereotyping you can imagine.

It's only half the film it promises to be; I was excepting a searing attack on the modern Arabian patriarchal dictator. Instead it has a half-arsed go at doing that while appealing to a mass audience by doing a shed load of hackneyed gross-out jokes. It's good that the film is only 80 minutes long, because it made it worth watching in spite of it falling short of doing what I expected of it - and I assume short of what Cohen expected of it too, since he seems like a clever guy.

Well anyway, the next thing I write on here will definitely be about Bond.