Movie Review: The Dictator

I remember that while watching Borat, there were literally tears in my eyes from laughing so hard, and it rather made me self-conscious. Almost everyone I know that saw that movie says the same thing: that they enjoyed it, and it was really funny. Perhaps, the lofty expectations that this produced made it more difficult to follow this up – especially when Sacha Baron Cohen returned the Borat character following the movie!
It was the funniest movie I had seen in years, personally, and was it not natural to hope that there might be a follow up movie?

The commercials for The Dictator seemed enticing enough, although not quite on the level of Borat. Still, it looked like it had potential.

Unfortunately, much of the funniest material was in the commercials. It was not a bad movie by any stretch, and was in fact enjoyable. It had it's funny moments, for sure. That said, it certainly is not funny enough to bring tears to your eyes, like Borat did.

The premise of the movie, you could more or less guess at just by having seen the commercials. Cohen plays Aberdeen , a dictator of the fictional, oil rich, North African Republic of Wadiya. Aberdeen rules his country with an iron fist, and is trying to amass a weapons arsenal that sends chills to the world community outside of it's borders. Tensions are mounting, and Aberdeen is pressures into paying a visit to New York City in order to give an address before the United Nations, to allay the concerns of the global community.

Of course, it does not go as planned.

Aberdeen finds himself the target of a plot to assassinate him during his stay in New York . Moreover, the double cross goes two ways, as those that he hired to protect him actually wind up capturing him and attempt to torture him. Ultimately, the best torture they can think of is to shave his beard, making him instantly unrecognizable.

So, Aberdeen makes his escape, but soon finds that he has already been replaced by a lookalike. He finds himself largely nameless and faceless in the Big Apple, and he has to try and navigate some way to get by, while he still hopes, ultimately, to regain the political power he once held with an iron fist.

While he is among the nameless and faceless, he goes to where the Wadiyan contingency is, and finds protestors there who hate his dictatorship, and all that he stands for. Luckily, he is unrecognizable, and blends in. He eventually meets a girl doing this, and while she holds some strange ideas initially, challenging everything that he has long believed, and he represents everything that she takes a strong, anti-dictatorship stance, they nonetheless eventually find themselves irresistibly attracted to each other. Of course, he has to hide who he really is, or she will be repulsed by him.

In the meantime, he watches, horrified, as his fill in look alike is being led to make sweeping changes in Wadiya, bringing a new, democratic constitution to liberalize and modernize his nation. There are already under the table deals with corporate interests to take over as soon as the nation opens it's doors to democracy and capitalism. On some, strange level, Aberdeen stands between this excess greed and the preservation of an older way for his nation, although all he wants is the privileged lifestyle that his unchallenged power provides for him, in the comfort of his home palace, instead of eking out a modest living in a foreign city, in a foreign country.

This movie was fairly funny, overall, but again, not on the level of Borat. Still, it does poke fun at a lot of things that have been in the news lately, including the tension of Middle Eastern dictatorships in the process of change, as well as the numerous plots and attempted coup d'etats, excessive self-indulgence of the very rich, the anti-establishment protests here in the West, and the moneyed interests that seem always at the heart of these power struggles and political changes. All in all, it's an entertaining movie, and at about an hour and change, not exactly a long movie. Go ahead and watch it just for kicks, but don't expect this to be a follow up to Borat.