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No, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has not flipped his lid. The real-life pranks and antics he scored big laughs with in Borat and Bruno have been replaced with actors, but the dark and scathing commentary still underscores his latest, The Dictator. Cohen still rules the black comedy market, but – this time out – he’s incorporated a bit more beardless silliness in the roll of the dice and lands his game piece on the tedious square at times. Don’t worry. The Dictator is still a funny movie and when Baron Cohen is on-target his aim is pretty sharp.
The Dictator follows power-hungry and politically incorrect Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen (Baron Cohen) as he traverses the urban jungle that is New York City. He gets lost, falls in love, and shaves. A dictator gets overthrown thanks to a conniving Uncle (Ben Kingsley) and replaced by an illiterate man who looks exactly like him (Baron Cohen, too) and a health food nut (an unrecognizable and extremely funny Anna Faris) tries to re-educate his mistaken and often bizarrely comical ways as it relates to tourism and, ironically enough, torture.
Aladeen, used to fixing athletic events and sleeping with famous women, gets completely stripped – pun intended – of his nuclear stockpiling identity and misuses his assumed power in daily situations throughout the city. A fish-out-of-water scenario that gets a bit searing with its use of political irony and physical comedy. Lanky limbs and priceless parody take center stage in The Dictator. No staging, just rehearsing.
Written by Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, but directed under the improvisational brilliance of Larry Charles, the collaboration - or meeting of the minds - falls somewhere closer to Borat in tone and Bruno in silliness, but – because it is a straight-forward non-gimmicky comedy – is unlike both films. There is no reality; it’s all staged commentary. Equal parts innocent and guilty, Cohen and his collaborators satirize, expose, and ridicule politics and human nature…without the natural surprise of unpolished performances.
Through it all, Baron Cohen doesn’t shy away from the full-frontal and flaccidically (new word, I know) outrageous moments. Sure, the oomph is reduced because everything is planned, but take the following three examples for a blood-pressure test. The Dictator presents us with (1) a video game based on the massacre of athletes, (2) a man’s head is used as a hand puppet, and (3) a cellphone gets lost in the womb of a woman in labor. Decide for yourself.
Yes, The Dictator is outrageous. Yes, it’s tasteless. But, even more than that, it is balls-to-the-wall hysterical and The Dictator, while not consistent, produces some of the most gut-rattling laughs ever heard in theatres.
MPAA Rating: R for strong crude and sexual content, brief male nudity, language and some violent images.
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