Review: The Dictator

In a film dedicated in ‘Loving memory of Kim Jong-Il’), Sacha Baron Cohen stars as cruel and trigger-happy dictator Admiral General Aladeen, who despite a Middle Eastern accent is apparently ruler of a fictional North African country...that is rich in oil. He’s egotistical, racist, a misogynist, a murderer (with a seriously short fuse), has been sexually serviced by several Hollywood stars (male and Meagan Fox), is working on a nuclear weapons program, and is a complete tool. His presence is requested in New York for the UN, but his comrade-in-arms and uncle Tamir (Sir Ben Freakin’ Gandhi Kingsley!) has other ideas and arranges to have him snuffed and replaced by an impersonator. He avoids that, but is now in New York with nowhere to go and no one to help him. After being kidnapped and shaved of his beard by a local nutjob (an unfunny John C. Reilly), Aladeen (sounds like Aladdin, right?) walks into a greenie food store run by a lefty activist girl with a pixie cut and hairy armpits (Anna Faris, playing an unflattering and unfunny stereotype). Despite offending her and all of her co-workers, Aladeen (going by the oh-so hilarious name of Alison Burgers) manages to get a job there. In order to set things wrong (you can hardly side with a dictator, right?), he must team up with one of his former underlings, who has somehow survived execution and is living in America. Alongside every other person Aladeen had ordered to be executed. Supposed hilarity ensues, lots of cameos abound.

 

The good news: Unlike “Borat” and “Bruno”, this 2012 so-called comedy directed by Larry Charles has a genuine laugh in it. It’s the birth scene, in case you’re wondering and I feel very ashamed of myself for laughing at a fake vagina, but there you go. The bad news? The rest of the film is so appallingly unfunny and just generally appalling that it ends up being a worse film overall than “Borat” or “Bruno” (both of which were directed by Charles, btw). It is not, however, the most embarrassing and desperately unfunny film Sir Ben Kingsley has been associated with. That would be “The Love Guru”, so the film has that going for it. Most of the film is shockingly lazy and cheap, but Mr. Cohen and co-writers Alec Berg, David Mandel, Jeff Schaffer (writers of the much funnier “Eurotrip”), should be genuinely ashamed of themselves for jokes about raping children (Ricky Martin’s boy band Menudo, specifically), and suggesting certain male actors have had sex with him, or in the case of Tommy Lee Jones, let a Chinese dignitary ‘roll it’ in his fingers). At least with the Meagan Fox gag, Ms. Fox herself is a willing participant in the film (though not remotely talented or funny), I hope Cohen informed the other actors that he was name-dropping them here. I doubt it, though, that’s not Cohen’s style to break character or ruin the surprise. I could forgive the offensiveness if it were funny, but that Menudo joke in particular simply isn’t funny.

 

However, at least this film isn’t a sub-par Norman Gunston ‘act goofy and embarrass real people who aren’t in on the joke’ knock-off, like “Borat” or “Bruno”. In those films you could never enjoy the ridiculing because Cohen’s schtick was so off-putting and unfair that you almost sided with his targets, even the disreputable ones. Instead, Cohen, director Charles, and the co-writers have concocted a film that is somewhere in between a lame TV comedy sketch stretched beyond its limits, and plot elements stolen from Adam Sandler’s awful “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (It plays a lot like something Sandler would find hilarious), and Eddie Murphy’s excellent “Coming to America”. The result is pretty half-arsed and sloppy, and the “Coming to America” fish-out-of-water romantic comedy stuff doesn’t work when the misplaced foreigner is an evil, murderous dictator!

 

A lot of people find Cohen’s climactic monologue to be the film’s highlight as it points out the hypocrisy of the US and compares it to a dictatorship. Personally I found it an obvious gag, but at least it wasn’t a terribly offensive one. The scene where Aladeen and his offsider are in a helicopter having a conversation about a Porsche that gets misconstrued by other passengers as a terrorist plot, had black comedy potential but doesn’t come off. Other gags such as Cohen’s character’s name becoming a word that means both positive and negative, are lame TV sketch show stuff. Ditto the scene where he is asked for his name and he makes up a series of lame fake ones based on signage he sees (Ladiz Washroom? A lot of 6 year-olds wouldn’t even find that funny).

 

The main character’s sexism and misogyny are also nowhere near as funny as Mr. Cohen (whose performance is entirely uninspired) and friends seem to think, and we get way too many of those sorts of gags in the film. The Osama Bin Laden jokes are even worse, completely unfunny and frankly a bit dated. Meanwhile, I normally like Anna Faris, but here she’s given a bit of a gross caricature to play, and it’s not funny at all. Even John C. Reilly is off his game here.

 

I guess if you’re a Sacha Baron Cohen fan, you’ll enjoy this film, but I got almost zero out of it. Cohen’s humour just doesn’t appeal to me at all (Remember his Oscars stunt where he poured ashes all over Ryan Seacrest? I would’ve decked him for it). For starters, going by the title, I assumed Cohen would lampoon Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”. I was wrong. Cohen has probably never even heard of Chaplin. He does appear to have seen “American Reunion”, however, as he essentially steals the gag where Jim’s cock is visible through glass kitchenware (except it’s not a pot lid here).

 

No, I didn’t enjoy this one at all. It just made me appreciate “Team America: World Police” (no great film itself) even more. It was just as childish, but at least it’s Kim Jong-Il jokes were genuinely funny.

 

Rating: D+