Director: Larry Charles

Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley, and John C. Reilly

Rated: R

Runtime: 83 min.

 

 

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest in his long pageant of ironically ignorant characters is named Admiral Colonel Aladeen, the megalomaniacal idiot leader of the small, fictional North African country, the Republic of Wadiya. Born into wealth and power, he assumed supremacy at the age of 7 and that’s about where his intellectual development stopped. It takes no more than a mild offence to be executed under his rule, like the guy who had the misfortune to get the cereal box toy Aladeen wanted. His life is filled with excesses; just look at his elaborate golden-ornamented mansion, which is filled with taxidermied wild animals, gaudy portraits of himself, and no end of concubines. Moreover, Aladeen beds countless celebrities like Meagan Fox and Halle Berry and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he also just wants someone to love and cuddle. Now Aladeen wants to build weapons of mass destruction, and the world has gone on alert.

Comparable to Saddam Hussein in a movie dedicated to Kim Jong-il, Aladeen is the titular character in The Dictator, which reteams Cohen with his Borat (2006) and Brüno (2009) director Larry Charles. Written by Cohen’s usual band of screenwriters and pieced together in a loose assemblage of footage, this comedy proceeds with the thinnest of plotlines, fully dependent on Aladeen’s exaggerated political incorrectness to fill the gaps. After Aladeen announces his plans to begin a nuclear program, the United Nations demands he appear in New York to address their concerns. But Aladeen’s right-hand man, his cousin Tamir (Sir Ben Kinsley, picking up an easy paycheck), the rightful heir to the Wadiya throne, has other plans. Tamir wants Aladeen assassinated so the country’s oil assets can be sold to various international interests. And so, in a plot point reminiscent of The Devil’s Double, Tamir hires a Southern-Fried American contract killer (John C. Riley) to wipe out Aladeen, who will then be replaced with an even more simple-minded look-alike.

 

Continued HERE

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