In the recent decades there has been a trend towards semi-documentary or fiction-documentary movies. And by that i mean, movies about famous persons, but seen through a fictional character (i.e "Hugo"). This movie presents a fictional scottish doctor in 1971, who, because he is fed up with the petty bourgois of his parents, spins a globus and picks a random destination to go work at. That turns out to be Uganda, exactly at the time when Idi Amin´s coupt d´etat takes place.
By chance he meets the new dictatator and ends up becoming his personal doctor and advisor. And then he also manages, unknowingly, to impregnate one of Amin´s wifes on the trip down there. At first he lives in the propaganda of the charming dictator and he is showered with gifts and so on. But slowly he realizes, that the man is a complete sociopath, and in the end does unspeakable things to people that do not obey him, like when he finds out that his wife is pregnant with the doctor. But the plot centers mostly around the "relationship" between the dictator and the doctor and it does not really get much around to describe the "development" of the country or the hundreds of thousands of individuals he killed in this regime of terror.
I find the boyish looking doctor character is out of place. He looks like a puberty boy who can only think with his dick. Why would he be able to charm one of Amins wifes into pregnancy or charm Amin into becoming his personal advisor? If it is to appeal to the young moviegoers, it is a misfire. But then Whittaker does a mighty fine job at holding up the only interesting character in the movie, the dictator himself. He has got the crazyness in his eyes and his smirky grin dead on as far as i can see (though i am certainly not an Amin expert). He gets the perfect balance between his big grin public persona and his paranoid and psychopathic private persona. He understands how to lure people in, and when they are cought in the net, he makes them their property and do his bidding.
But then no matter how well Amin is portrayed, the plot cannot carry this movie and it becomes an uninteresting tale of the fictional characters realisation, that his employer is a psychopatic dictator ... i mean duuuh. It just is not interesting and that story is known already be everyone, except the most ignorant moviegoer, ahead of time. It feels like a big excuse for making a film, with Idi Amin in it, for whatever purpose that may serve. I am not particularly impressed with the movie overall.
Rating: 5/10