Review of The Devil's Double (2011) by Indira S — 05 Jan 2013

Unimpressive and honestly quite lazy filmmaking. Lee Tamahori is a terrible director, he always has been. This is not his worst film but it is certainly not very good. It feels like he painted some hammy and overwritten caricature of what the real Uday Hussein was like.

Another aspect that really annoyed me was the acting by Dominic Cooper. He acts relatively well when portraying Latif but when he is supposed to transition into Uday he's just annoying. The near constant sex and violence is another complaint, they leave almost no room for anything to develop.

This is a shining example of how violence is misused in films nowadays, it used to have purpose and meaning to the story and the characters but now we have films like this where when the violence could've been used properly and subtly it is actually blown out of proportion and is totally devoid of any realism.

Dizzying and outrageous this is a good film to eat up time with but nothing more. A poorly directed, decently acted film with an interesting premise and flawed execution, nothing more.