The Dictator (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Larry Charles. Starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley.
As shock comedies go, The Dictator is dumb, but mostly it's just dull.
Sacha Baron Cohen stars (and writes and produces) as General Aladeen, oppressive dictator of a fictional North African republic. A failed assassination plot during a trip to the United Nations strips him of his beard and identity, leaving him to wander around New York City like a violent, chauvinistic, sexually deviant Crocodile Dundee. He must keep his identity secret while finding a way to reclaim the dictatorship, stop democracy from coming to his country, and woo an ultraliberal fair trade grocery store owner (Anna Faris).
Sacha Baron Cohen loves challenging social norms and inflaming moral sensibilities; it's a shame he isn't willing to do the same with movie clichés. For all its "edgy" trappings (i.e. rape and terrorism jokes), The Dictator is a by-the-book fish-out-of-water comedy, unwilling to dispense with any of the conventions of that genre-not even the love story, which in this case might be the least plausible and least compelling onscreen romance in history. The film features a woman being milked by a goat herder, implied oral sex with a decapitated head, and a man eating an almond removed from an exploded skull cavity, but none of it is more painfully awkward than the interactions between Baron Cohen and Faris.
The Dictator has some funny scenes, most of which are arguments between Aladeen and Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas), a nuclear weapons engineer who Aladeen once tried to have executed. But once you look past the shock value, it's clear that few of the jokes are particularly original or intelligent, pushing no boundaries except the wretch-inducing kind. Those jokes that lack sexual or fecal content-the opening gag, for example, a shot of Aladeen as a baby with a full beard-give a sense of the insipid level of humor the film typically deals in.
Some political content shows up in the form of shallow criticism of both third-world dictatorships and American democracy, but it feels half-hearted and tacked on.
A weak effort all around.
Rated R for an obsession with body hair.
2.5 out of 5
