Demob Happy

Out of Africa

6/10

This adaptation of Giles Foden’s book is a fairly conventional thriller set in a historical context. Forest Whittaker is undeniably brilliant as the ogreous Idi Amin; in all his explosive, unpredicatable idiosyncrasies. Like Uganda’s people, James McEvoy’s flippant young doctor is swept up by the African dictator’s powerful charisma and becomes his closest advisor. In an entirely fictitious plot the young Scot is first seduced by the lavish lifestyle afforded him and later increadingly disturbed by Amin’s murderous paranoia. However, the scene in which the young volunteer ‘befriends’ Amin seems jarringly implausable, earning his respect with an act too rash for credibility.

Amin’s seismic charisma is evoked early in the film with shakey, irratic closeups, generating a sense of giddy excitement for his showboating, larger-than-life personality. Here, like James McEvoy’s doctor, we are drawn uncomfortably close to the former Ugandan dictator, who looms oppressively oversized in the frame - large enough to terrify a nation. However, as McEvoy’s own life is threatened the plot takes an increasingly conventional turn as he chances death to escape the clutches of the African dictator. Whittaker’s Amin plays the villain of a more conventional piece, albeit a fittingly monstrous one. However, the viewer is left with the same pre-conception of African dictators as prescribed by the Western consciousness: that of the unknowable lunatic. While the film paints a suitably lurid portrait of the tasteless indulgences of corrupt power (”70s Dictator Chic”), the verisimility is wasted on the underwhelming ‘thrills’ of the final third. Moreover, the climax is underscored by incidental music so overegged it would make most Hollywood producers blush.

As with much cinema of a biographical nature, The Last King of Scotland seems to regurgitate ingrained cultural assuptions of an infamous figure, re-telling us what we already know. The film’s climax very conveniently incorporates the Israeli hostage crisis that made Amin an internationally reviled Pariah, again impounding a sense that we are being given the conventional wisdom on Amin, nothing more. As a historical analysis this is fairly superficial, but biopics are generally superfluous and second-rate. As a political thriller this is filmmaking of a fairly ordinary kind, but a vivid and well-acted one nonetheless.