Showing posts with label Sasha Baron Cohen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sasha Baron Cohen. Show all posts

Thursday 17 May 2012

The Dictator

Admiral General Aladeen (Sasha Baron Cohen) is the dictator of the fictitious North African Republic of Wadiya. After his attempts to build nuclear weapons are announced he is summoned to the UN to explain his and his country’s plans. While in New York he is betrayed and an attempt is made on his life. After escaping he discovers that he has been replaced with a double and finds himself working in a vegan, shared earth coop where he becomes friends with Zoey (Anna Farris). Aladeen uses the coop to try to regain his identity and his grip on power in Wadiya.

For his 4th feature, Baron Cohen has moved away from the mocumentary style for which he has become synonymous and The Dictator is mostly played as a straight forward comedy feature. The character of Aladeen is based on a hodgepodge of various real life dictators and draws from the West’s perceptions of them and their countries. The result is that Aladeen is a racist, sexist, cartoon who while being occasionally funny, generally fails to impress. The humour of the film on the whole failed to resonate with me and the majority of the audience I saw it with, indeed a man on the row in front of me walked out about an hour in having not laughed once.