The Dictator (**3/4)

A witty satire of cultural stereotyping and world politics…is not really what this movie is. Sacha Baron Cohen has exhausted the trio of characters he created for Da Ali G Show, his UK television series, and has invented a new one, Aladeen, of the fictional north African nation of Wadiya. Unlike in Borat and Bruno, the last two, there are no scenes in which Cohen interacts with people who don’t know he’s acting. It’s all scripted, that is. The movie is dedicated in “loving memory” of Kim Jong Il, but Aladeen seems to be more modeled on Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, with bits of Saddam Hussein and Saparmurat Niyazov, the strongman of Turkmenistan who renamed months of the year for his family members. Aladeen instead replaces the words for good and bad with Aladeen, leading to much confusion. (Niyazov also banned beards, but Aladeen has a giant one.)

To phrase it in Wadiyan terms, the new movie is both Aladeen and Aladeen. I missed the old Cohen, who would hilariously expose the prejudices of real people by interacting with them in character. No matter how many jokes about infanticide and rape he makes here, without that element the movie isn’t edgy. (About the closest it comes is when Aladeen implies that American political leaders achieve the same thing as dictators by manipulating public opinion. This may upset Tea Party fans but is still pretty mild.) Additionally, Aladeen is a pastiche and less original than Cohen’s other characters. He’s supposed to be both repugnant and, as the story goes on, more sympathetic, and it’s a little jarring to root for a guy who, it’s implied, has seriously pedophilic and murderous tendencies. Not that you’ll care much about the characters one way or another.

On the Aladeen side, the reality element pointed up the artificiality of the very fictional plot in Borat, and here, that’s gone. The story, which finds Aladeen on the streets of New York while his body double prepares to make a U.N. speech, is no more believable than before, but I cared less. Basically, this is long-form sketch comedy. Some scenes, especially the one in which Aladeen delivers a baby, seem like padding in a movie that barely breaks 80 minutes. In that case it seems like it is mostly supposed to be funny solely by virtue of being crude. The other parts are crude too, but if you don’t mind that, funny. Cohen’s frequent foil is Anna Faris, playing the tomboyish proprietor of an organic, green, independent grocery. Riding on the back of her motorcycle, he holds on by grabbing her breast. Chastised, he says, “I thought you were a boy.”

IMDb link

viewed 6/16/12 4:25 at Riverview and reviewed 6/17/12