The Dictator

If there’s one thing I admire about Sacha Baron Cohen, it’s his uncanny ability to always get a laugh out of his audience. The English actor and comedian, whose award-winning “Da Ali G Show" launched a television comedy career to be reckoned with, has what some would refer to as “funny bones,” although perhaps those bones belong to his ingeniously conceived characters. In the world of cinema, Cohen deservedly found international success with his “Borat” and “Brüno,” both satirical mockumentaries whose comedy value relied almost entirely on the reactions of unsuspecting members of the American public to Cohen’s comically uncouth titular creations - a culturally confused Kazakh journalist and a gay Austrian fashion reporter, respectively. I should note that very few of Cohen’s innocent victims found him particularly amusing.

His latest work is not a mockumentary, perhaps because Cohen’s global fame/infamy has rendered his face all too recognisable for the reactive gags to work - ah, the price of stardom. “The Dictator” is instead a wholly scripted production (some probable improvisation aside), Cohen’s first since his debut starring role in the sporadically funny “Ali G Indahouse.” Notably, the film’s title dares comparison with Charlie Chaplin’s masterful 1940 Adolf Hitler satire “The Great Dictator.” And while Cohen’s latest cinematic conception never quite climbs to the heights of a great dictator, it sits comfortably at the level of a decent dictator - although Admiral General Aladeen is anything but decent.

Aladeen is Cohen’s latest incarnation, and as an alter ego of Cohen he ranks up there with Ali G and Borat. An obvious parody of such real-life dictators as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il (to whom the film is lovingly dedicated), Aladeen is the “beloved oppressor” of the fictional North African Republic of Wadiya. Sporting a luxurious black beard (sans moustache) and a white uniform decorated with medals and a pair of golden shoulder tassels, Aladeen spends his days reciting speeches to a crowd of cheering worshippers from his majestic palace, having sex with Hollywood celebs in his deluxe bedroom (there’s Megan Fox’s cameo right there), giggling at the prospect of civil rights and equality for women, and having various employees mercilessly executed for trivial reasons (nabbing a cereal box toy from him, for example).

The United States government is none too happy with Aladeen: they’ve discovered that he has plans to develop nuclear weapons (which he insists must be pointy at the top). He’s advised to give a speech at the UN, and so travels to New York City, where his arrival is less than welcome. During the night before the speech, something terrible happens: Aladeen is kidnapped from his hotel room by a hitman (John C. Reilly, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”), tied to a chair and has his precious beard shaved off. He escapes, and watches in shock horror from a big screen on the street as a body double delivers his speech at the UN and announces plans to turn his oppressed nation of Wadiya into a democracy. Gasp!

As it turns out, Aladeen’s second-in-command and rightful heir to the Wadiyan throne, uncle Tamir (Sir Ben Kingsley, having fun), was the one who hired the hitman, replaced him with a look-alike and has plans to make billions from an oil scheme in the soon-to-be-democratised Wadiya. A beardless - and consequently unrecognisable - Aladeen, meanwhile, is left wandering the mean streets of Manhattan claiming to be the Admiral General and understandably treated like a raving loony.

Aladeen reluctantly takes on the unlikeliest of friends: Zoey (Anna Faris, “The House Bunny”), an uber-left protestor and feminist studies graduate who owns a fair trade grocery store that employs only asylum seekers. Of course, Aladeen ends up working in Zoey’s store, but under a hastily conceived pseudonym: Alison Burgers. Faris, whose eyes are adorable and whose soft voice is very soothing, showed much comic talent in the “Scary Movie” franchise, and she displays it in full force here, reacting to Aladeen’s insensitive comments and unmannerly behaviour with both precise comic timing and a lovable sweetness: Zoey puts his rotten attitude towards women, gays and ethnic minorities down to cultural differences.

Naturally, Zoey becomes the film’s highly unlikely love interest, a fact manifested on-screen while Zoey and Aladeen are, for lack of a better phrase, wrist-deep inside a woman’s lady-parts. Allow me to explain: in Zoey’s store, a pregnant customer finds herself going into labour. Aladeen offers a hand, literally, and is faced with the prospect of having to deliver a child right then and there in the middle of the store. Due to Aladeen’s mid-procedure answering of a mobile phone, Zoey steps in and slides her hand inside the woman’s you-know-what alongside Aladeen’s. And, in a shot actually filmed from deep inside this woman’s birth canal, Zoey and Aladeen’s uterus-probing hands are seen to touch, entwine and embrace. Zoey and Aladeen gaze at one another, lock eyes, and an impossible romance blossoms in amongst a sticky puddle of amniotic fluid. It’s quite sweet, actually.

This is one of many examples in “The Dictator” of Cohen’s long-standing relationship with gross-out humour, something he has shown to cherish ever since receiving hand relief from an unwitting old blind man outside the Houses of Parliament in “Ali G Indahouse.” In “Brüno,” I believe Cohen went too far; in “The Dictator,” he gets the balance just about right, although the film is not without its moments of desperation: a scene in which Aladeen’s double, of course also played by Cohen, skillfully milks a prostitute into a tin bucket, for example. But it’s not all bodily fluids and excrement here; “The Dictator” also contains a bit of comparatively broad humour, and in a climactic speech, Cohen turns that of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator" on its head and practices the kind of fearless, merciless political satire we’ve come to know and love him for.

I think it says a lot that while “The Dictator" is Cohen’s most plot-centric adventure yet, Cohen and director Larry Charles focus almost all of their attention on individual comic set-pieces, a decision which has its ups and downs. On the one hand, this provides much comic value as Cohen time and time again ambitiously attempts to bulldoze the walls of tastefulness with gags involving severed heads and sky-high defecation without worrying too much about the narrative. On the other hand, I would have liked to have been more engaged in the plot itself, which acts merely as a collection of springboards for these gags to leap forth from, as Aladeen heroically attempts to reclaim his throne and ensure that his nation does not become a democracy. Then again, I think I may have been laughing hard enough and often enough to compensate, and in the end I was ultimately quite satisfied with the whole thing.

“The Dictator” is Cohen’s biggest production so far and possibly his most mainstream too (in spite of all the grotesquery), but it’s not his best; I think most will agree that spot belongs to “Borat.” But it is very funny, and in Aladeen, Cohen has created a character who is so racist and sexist, anti-Semitic and anti-west that he becomes endearingly insulting and strangely quite lovable. I’m not sure what Cohen will do next, but whatever it is, I firmly believe he will once again show off his funny bones - or rather, his character’s funny bones.

7/10