The Dictator Review
By David Kempler
The Littler Dictator
Borat, Ali G, and Bruno are no more. Sacha Baron Cohen has switched to playing a role where everyone is operating from a script. No more of the pranks on his unwitting dupes on the screen. Can he reproduce the greatness of a Borat? The jury remains out after the release of "The Dictator". It's funny, but lacks the slap-in-the-face feel of his other ventures, and it has been those slaps that have propelled him to the top of the comedy heap.
Cohen has Larry Charles directing again and Charles is good, as is Cohen, but like most comedies, the best gags are revealed in the numerous versioned trailers that have blanketed your television screen. If you could see this without first being exposed to the ads this would work a lot better, but you would have to either not own a TV or be living in a cave to avoid the onslaught.
This dictator is modeled after Khadafy as he was portrayed in our media. He is a buffoonish caricature, behaving in ways that run contrary to normal reason. This is not to say that Khadafy wasn't really like that. Cohen knows that 90 minutes of this would be tough for the general public to digest, so midway through, he turns it into a very odd sort of love story where he ends up working in a green grocer, run by Zoey (Anna Faris) a pixieish left-wing do-gooder. The rest of what this is all about isn't important. It involves political subterfuge with Tamir (Ben Kingsley) as the lead bad guy.
"The Dictator" is funny some of the time, but so are lots of comedies. What is missing here is the meanness of Cohen's previous efforts. While they were almost cruel, they rang true. We relished the pomposity of people being lampooned. What replaces it here is a need to temper bad feelings and replace it with a need to tailor it to an American audience. At its conclusion, Cohen's character gives everyone what is supposed to be an ironic view of America through the eyes of a foreigner. Explaining things like this is a less powerful way of conveying a message than his previous ways of just letting it play out in front of us and let us come to our own conclusions about people and society. "The Dictator" is Cohen-lite, like a cheap refreshing beer. That's good, but he had previously set the bar much higher and hopefully he ascends again.
