Review of The Devil's Double (2011) by Harry W — 09 May 2014

Completely unaware of what The Devil's Double might entail, I watched it simply because the cover looked cool.

Although an apparently biographical story, The Devil's Double doesn't go about making the film itself feel realistic because the general atmosphere of the tale and the dramatisation of events makes it feel like a formulaic political crime drama set in the middle east. And considering that the way the story plays out adheres largely to that formula, The Devil's Double does little to stand out from the crowd as entertaining.

While The Devil's Double could have been a complicated and interesting exploration of Latif Yahia and Uday Hussein and the way that they both got involved in the criminal activities in the Middle East, it is simply a middling and slowly paced film which breathes no life into its story and distorts it enough for viewers to really question its validity. I don't know that I believe half of the things that happened in The Devil's Double, but more importantly I was not entertained by them which is a serious disappointment. Whatever relevance that The Devil's Double actually had to the real world is not capitalised on and despite the potential it had to examine a complicated relationship between Latif Yahia and Uday Hussein as their activities began to impact on society, and it instead reduced itself to a series of non-compelling and repetitive dramatic scenes which had less entertainment value than the previous one. The Devil's Double started with the potential to be the slightest bit entertaining but quickly descended into a scattered film without sufficient focus on what it was doing or an interesting premise or script which shows that Lee Tamahori's once admirable talent for directing the critically acclaimed New Zealand film Once Were Warriors is no longer central in him. He doesn't have the best material to work with, but he doesn't breathe any life into the film anyway, nor does he make it stylish because despite the scenery of the film, The Devil's Double is too focused on the interior setting of various buildings which are dull and poorly lit, combined with the same basic cinematography techniques in essentially every scene. The Devil's Double is just a really boring film. I can't say that I hated it, but it was challenging to actually want to make it through to the end of the film for anything other than the lead performance of Dominic Cooper.

The only really good aspect of The Devil's Double is Dominic Cooper in the lead role.

Dominic Cooper is the only aspect of The Devil's Double which makes it a memorable feature. While the rest of the film is boring, Dominic Cooper is interesting because of the way that he takes on a dual role very well. It is never easy to play a dual role because you have to be able to play multiple characters which are separable enough so that viewers can tell them apart and truly believe that they are multiple characters. Although the plot structure makes it different to tell the characters apart constantly because they are identical, Dominic Cooper takes on the role easily. Interacting with himself as two characters, Dominic Cooper manages to easily create chemistry with himself as multiple characters very easily. And he adds a certain sense of aggressive grit to the role very easily and makes both characters seemingly organic to him. Although The Devil's Double is a boring film, it does serve as a medium for the versatile acting talents of Dominic Cooper in a lead role so it isn't all a waste.

But aside from Dominic Cooper, The Devil's Double features no memorable cast members because they simply all give routine efforts with nothing really memorable to it. They all have forgettable faces and fail to make an impact on the story, all they do is remind audiences of the dull script and the weak nature of the film.

So despite the strong dual role from Dominic Cooper, The Devil's Double is too formulaic and limited within its genre to be a memorable film and it is too slow and boring to constitute sufficient entertainment.