The Dictator (2012)
Certified: 16
Duration: 83 minutes
Directed by: Larry Charles
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Anna Faris, Jason Mantzoukas, John C. Reilly, B.J. Novak, Chris Elliott, Fred Armisen
KRS release

I had tremendously enjoyed Sacha Baron Cohen’s rude and offensive Borat (2006), marking it down as one of my favourite movies of that year.

The Dictator has moments that are pure laugh-out-loud. (Some sequences) spring to mind- Johan Galea

The follow-up Bruno (2009) was too much of a retread and his turn as Inspector Gustav in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) was simply endearing.

With The Dictator, Mr Baron Cohen returns to his rude, scatological and over-the-top offensive humour methods, but the overall effort left me cold.

I had enjoyed Borat because it was unpredictable and did not tie itself down with traditional storytelling methods.

The Dictator is very much a retread of Eddie Murphy’s 1988 Coming To America, and this seriously limits its unpredictability.

The country of Wadiya is ruled by Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), who is one of the world’s last dictators.

This gives him the chance to win his own Olympic Games, several film awards for his own films, build nuclear weapons, change the vocabulary, have sex with Megan Fox and simply do anything he wants.

He is helped by his second-in-command Tamir (Ben Kingsley), who plots behind his back to take over Wadiya and sell it to the oil companies so that he can buy a house and go and live next to George Clooney!

On a visit to the US, Tamir befriends a volatile and psychotic American agent (John C. Reilly) and Aladeen is kidnapped and replaced by an idiot lookalike (Sacha Baron Cohen, of course).

Aladeen meanwhile is irrecognisable as he has lost his beard.

He finds help from Zoey (Anna Faris), who is the owner of a health food store and is very active in protest groups and women’s rights movements.

He is given a job and they both end up becoming very close.

Aladeen meets up with former nuclear scientist Nada (Jason Mantzoukas), whom he had once ordered executed and who now befriends him to restore his dictatorship.

Aladeen must choose to either be a dictator or embrace democracy and get Zoey in the package.

The Dictator has moments that are pure laugh-out-loud. First off, the dedication of the film to Korean dictator Kim Jong Il serves to set the tone, then there is the whole torture sequence and the helicopter tourist bit. The sequence when Aladeen enters a restaurant full of his haters is also priceless – and these are the ones that to spring to mind offhand.

Meanwhile the sequence on learning about masturbation was a bit too extended to be all that funny as Mr Baron Cohen evidently thought that it was.

The problem is that I felt that the whole traditional storyline has limited Mr Baron Cohen and placed limitations on the unpredictability that he is well known for.

The romantic comedy element that came along with this change in structure was naff and contrived.

Anna Faris, who is a brilliant comedienne in her own right, was left stranded with the “girly ” role waiting to be swept off her feet by the handsome dictator.

There is no spark between the two and she is not given the chance to flex her comical muscles. The two sparring together would have been a nice touch to the film.

I can understand that the move from mockumentary to more traditional structure was necessary because in Bruno the audience had grown wise to Mr Baron Cohen’s tricks. But in The Dictator it seems that he is still not comfortable with this move.

A lot more work needs to be done to make the effort seem more coherent and unified rather than being all over the place.

Funny at times, predictable at others, irreverent throughout, by the end the problem is that it ends up being too much of a routine.