The Not-So-Great Dictator

The Dictator

** out of ****

Directed by: Larry Charles

Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jason Mantzoukas, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley and John C. Reilly

Running time: 83 minutes

Sacha Baron Cohen is one of this generation’s most powerful comedy forces, whether it is lampooning sects of American culture through his popular sketch comedy creations Ali G, Borat and Brüno (which spawned three feature-length films) or as sterling comic relief in films like Hugo.

In his latest feature, The Dictator, Cohen attempts to bridge the realms of sketch comedy and narrative comedy, but with mixed results. He seems unwilling to abandon his roots as a sketch performer, but unfortunately, his penchant for quick laughs in episodic situations doesn’t fulfill the needs of a feature-length story.

When we first meet Cohen’s Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen (get it?), the feared tyrant of the fictional North African region of Wadiya, the comic stands tall and proud on the balcony of a gold-encrusted desert palace.

Aladeen gleefully announces to his people that he is close to enriching weapons-grade uranium. This draws staunch condemnation from the United Nations – or what Aladeen calls “the devil’s nest of America.” The dictator and his staff travel to New York to face the diplomacy.

Before getting to the UN, though, an undercover operative assigned by the dictator’s uncle, Tamir (Ben Kingsley), strips Aladeen of his beard. Tamir wants to turn Wadiya into a thriving democracy and unleash its oil reserves. He gets Aladeen’s oblivious double (also played by Baron Cohen) to pretend he is the ruler and get goodwill from the UN.

Without his beard, none of the protesters outside the UN recognizes the real Aladeen when he shows up. Instead, the crowd thinks he is a political dissident, including Zoey (Anna Faris), an exaggerated left-wing stereotype – she owns a vegan, organic, environmentally friendly bakery of sorts – that also becomes Aladeen’s inevitable love interest.

The Dictator features some comic landmines from earlier Baron Cohen films, from the sly ethnically altered music (R.E.M.’s powerful tear-jerker “Everybody Hurts” is hilariously dubbed in Wadiyan) to mixing in Hebrew with the foreign gibberish the protagonist uses (here, it doubles as fake Arabic).

However, the film is an awkward mix of sketch comedy scenes and a linear, coherent narrative. Some of the sketch comedy scenes are riotously funny, including a helicopter scene over Manhattan that flirts disastrously with 9/11 references.

Others feel dated, relying on broad slapstick and tired ideas, such as one scene where Aladeen tries to make up a fake name for himself at a restaurant by taking the phonetic sounds from signs hanging around.

As a result, the story progression feels forced and leaves some terrific actors at the butt of uninspired material. John C. Reilly’s coy hotel clerk, the unconvincing (and quite misogynist) romance with Anna Faris’s Zoey, and embarrassing cameos from Edward Norton and Garry Shandling are only a few examples of primary actors being wasted on inferior secondary characters.

I enjoyed many of the comedy set-ups in The Dictator – I never thought that I would laugh at the Munich Olympics murders and infanticide so freely – but at the end of the film, very little of the material worked for the benefit of the story.

The film is frenetically silly and often hilarious, but rarely convincing. The characters are such obvious stereotypes that it’s difficult to feel the cutting swipes Cohen and director Larry Charles are aiming for. It’s a hard movie to take seriously, which could have been a compliment if The Dictator didn’t attempt to be a topical political satire.