Review of The Last King of Scotland (2006) by Ray D — 12 Dec 2009

Last King of Scotland isn't a great film, sadly--it's merely a good one with a great performance at its center--Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, a hypnotic, larger-than-life dictator capable of extreme brutality.

Unfortunately, Amin is often kept at arm's length by the film's story, which focuses instead on James McAvoy's (fictional) Dr. Garrigan, a bit of a wet noodle who comes to Africa on a whim, and falls in with Amin's regime almost by chance (bad luck for a certain cow).

Garrigan's loss of innocence as he learns more about what exactly Amin is capable of is meant to parallel the audience's, and there's nothing WRONG with it, per se, but of all the directions to approach the story from, this is an extraordinarily blunt one, and it was an odd feeling, by the final scenes, to have a main character that was actually lamenting his perceived irrelevance on screen.

It was good to see an (underused) Gillian Anderson, though, and in an odd way, the film is one long joke at Canada's expense.