Review of The Dictator (2012) by Nickyj56K — 07 Sep 2012

Boy, did Sasha Baron Cohen ever miss the mark with 'The Dictator.' Like many others have said, I wanted to like this movie. I paused the DVD about 45 minutes in and debated slogging through the rest of it for the sake of finality. Who knows, maybe it would get better. But boy, it didn't. The majority of the jokes were anecdotal, like "Don't worry, I was the best _______ in Wadiya, I came first place in the Wadiyan _______ competition!" And the other guy, the nuclear scientist guy would reply with "But you were its only competitor! You had everyone else killed or disappeared because you're the Wadiyan dictator and that's what you do you **** Let's do slightly different iterations of this joke about 50 more times throughout this film and hope it's still funny." The jokes were like Family Guy flashback gags without the cutaways. Well, there were some, but that of course doesn't excuse how horribly written and repetitive the jokes in this movie were. Another example would be Anna Faris's hippie co-op store-owner, that Aladeen would constantly make jokes about her not shaving her armpits. Seriously, he must've said that like twenty times, culminating in a scene where he licked the **** things. Again, like other reviewers said, I started getting angry towards the end of this film. Baron Cohen is so much better than this movie. 'Borat' was a lot more intelligent and politically inclined than 'The Dictator', and THAT movie had a naked wrestling scene for **** sake. If you're a Sasha Baron Cohen fan, skip this film. If you've never seen any of his work, don't watch this movie. Cohen is a lot better when he's messing with real people disguised as "Borat" or "Bruno", but now that those characters are so popular, and he himself is famous and recognizable, he can no longer make such movies. But hopefully 'The Dictator' isn't all that's left in his comedic repertoire.

I rate this film 1 out of 10, and it gets rating of 1 simply for the fact that it's a movie.