Nothing is sacred in comedy. Living in a post-9/11 world where Saddam Hussein, Kim-Jong Il and Osama bin Laden are all dead, it’s a bit easier to satirize the role of a dictator, particularly in the Arab world. Such well-publicized figures provide obvious examples of inspiration to caricatures like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Admiral General Aladeen. Satire is meant to sting, to offend, to generally rile and piss people off, but most importantly to provide insight into tangible issues worth discussing. The Dictator’s shocks come off half-cocked and benefit no such higher purpose, as the movie accumulates a poorly-executed jumble of disgusting set pieces and crass sight gags.
The merciless degree to which writers Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer pummel the audience with depraved joke after joke makes the entire experience an endurance test. Despite its rapid-fire humor, The Dictator felt pretty languid, its mere hour-and-a-half runtime dragging to untenable lengths. It’s the kind of movie that will shock and disturb even the most unmoved audiences.
Its concept would have made for a fantastic SNL sketch, particularly the first minutes of the film. But Admiral General Aladeen’s Wadiyan accent, persistent misogynistic quips and physical absurdity wear thin in a heartbeat. Cohen is one of the most talented comedic actors of our time, but his efforts fall short with a vile, persistently lazy script.
Every time Cohen makes a film now, particularly while partnering with frequent collaborator Larry Charles, it will be compared to Borat. This isn’t only because Borat is easily one of the funniest movies of all time, but because it was such an incisive, successful satire. There is a reiteration of that movie’s themes in this one, making mockeries of the United States and likening our political system to a dictatorship. But satire requires balance between gross, shock value and insightful commentary, which is exactly what The Dictator lacks.
For instance, scatological humor can elicit laughs on its own. But place it in the context of a prissy, Southern dinner setting and you have comedic gold. Real people could compensate for lapses in Cohen’s energy and ingenuity in Borat, as well as all of his sketches on the magnificent Da Ali G Show. With no dumbstruck Americans to play off of his silly pranks, the satirical gestures in The Dictator fall flat. As clever as Cohen is, he benefits so much from the presence of people who don’t know what is up his sleeves. The surprise factor is completely gone when he throws jokes at actors with lines.
His counterparts in The Dictator make their best efforts to liven things up, particularly Anna Faris who plays vegan feminist Zoey. She ends up being the object of General Aladeen’s affection, as well as his armpit-licking, which is purportedly how Wadiyans engage in foreplay. Faris counteracts Cohen’s brash vulgarity with sincere honesty in her doe-eyed portrayal.
The few moments in which this movie worked were unbelievably frustrating because they revealed the missed potential of the whole thing. In one scene, Aladeen and his sidekick Nadal (a former nuclear weapons engineer whom Aladeen believed he had killed) take a helicopter trip to see the sights in New York City, with two unsuspecting fellow travelers. Their conversation in Wadiyan, which sounds like a bastardized version of Arabic and glottal sounds made by Gollum, references a Porsche 911. As soon as Aladeen makes hand motions as if driving a car (or airplane) and says 911, of course the fellow passengers begin to freak out. It’s a great moment because it exploits the unconscious American fear of Muslims, and our constant counter-terrorist minded neuroticism. Scenes like that get soiled by images of decapitated heads fellating people, hands clasped inside a pregnant woman’s vagina and semen getting rubbed on women’s faces.
A lot of the crudeness just felt out of place, as if the writers were striving to hit a point they already made. The Dictator ended up coming off as a big-budget version of one of Robot Chicken’s worst episodes, complete with cardboard cutout characters lampooning around like idiots.
It’s a joy to watch people poke fun at the United States and call the country on the carpet for the inadequacies of its social and political policies. But it’s simply not accomplished by berating an audience with toilet humor and viscerally aberrant sight gags.
One of the final scenes in The Dictator features General Aladeen making derisive commentary about the nature of democracy in America, as he is about to assume the same form of governmental representation for his country Wadiya. This scene echoes the ending of the similarly titled 1940 Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator. Chaplin’s portrayal of Adenoid Hynkel (Hitler) occupies the same satirical vein as Cohen’s mockery of Middle Eastern dictators, but the results of his efforts are so much more potent and thought provoking. Even now, the final speech in The Great Dictator eerily speaks volumes to the world’s political climate. With a little more tact and calculated writing, Cohen could have hoped to walk in the shadow of Chaplin’s footsteps. It’s a lofty proposition to title a film so similarly to the work of the greatest auteur of all time, a challenge that Cohen boldly accepted. But the shoes are too big to fill for one general from Wadiya.