BEFORE: I pegged this film as my planned outro to the Chaplin chain months ago, just because of the title and (assumed) similar subject matter. I'm not intending to make a comparison between Charlie Chaplin and Sacha Baron Cohen (last seen in "Anchorman 2"), or saying that Cohen's the modern-day Chaplin, or anything like that. But sometimes when I check my OCD and suspend the linking, I gain some extra insights.
AFTER: I'm glad I stuck with this plan, because now I get to draw some great comparisons with Chaplin's "The Great Dictator". It doesn't even matter that Cohen's drawing his comedy from a more modern Qaddafi-like character instead of a classic Hitler-type. Comedy is always a reflection of the era it gets created in. And both films do their own riff on the "Prince and the Pauper" switcheroo by having their main actor pull double-duty as the dictator and a look-alike commoner.
In "The Dictator", Gen. Aladeen is at first in on the plan, because he needs to have look-alikes to deal with assassination attempts. But on a trip to address the United Nations, his own uncle has him kidnapped and replaced with an idiot double, in order to bring democracy to the country of Wadiya. He then gets mixed up with the crowd protesting his own trip, and has to survive on the hipster-infested streets of Brooklyn until he can find a way to prove his identity and get back into power. When the switch is made earlier in the film, it (theoretically, at least) allows more time for the effects.
Like Chaplin's film, this culminates in a speech that's meant to prove a political point - and like Chaplin's anti-socialist speech, this is likely to fall on deaf ears, for this is the chance you take when you mix politics into a comedy. Turns out they're not like chocolate and peanut butter - audiences go out to see a comedy in order to FORGET about politics. People in the 1930's felt that Chaplin injected too much of his own political views into his Hynkel-doppelganger speech, envisioning a world where men would rise above their hate, greed and brutality. Yeah, how did that plan work out?
As Aladeen, Cohen came closer in his speech to making some valid political points - sarcastically poking fun at the U.S. political system by claiming that in dictatorships there are rigged elections, governments can spy on their own citizens, lie about the reasons for going to war and ignore the health care needs of the poor, allow 1% of the people to have 99% of the wealth, torture prisoners, and use the media to scare people into supporting particular policies. Since these are all things that the U.S. government has been accused of, it's a backhand swipe at our own system. But, did audiences want to hear this in a comedy?
This speech is the only reason I'm not giving this film a "1" - because apart from the speech, it's the same "stranger in a strange land" comedy that we've seen the same actor do in "Borat" and "Bruno", and it's a case of diminishing returns. There's an attempt to make the character more sympathetic by adding the wrinkle about him never actually executing anyone (his executioner apparently let everyone who was sentenced to die escape to New York) but then you have to ask yourself what this reduces the character to, and what's gained by making the North African dictator a sympathetic (or just plain pathetic) idiot?
Also starring Anna Faris (last seen in "Brokeback Mountain"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Jason Mantzoukas, Chris Parnell (also last seen in "Anchorman 2"), Jessica St. Clair, with cameos from John C. Reilly (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Kevin Corrigan, Megan Fox, Fred Armisen (last heard in "The Smurfs"), Bobby Lee, Chris Elliott, Aasif Mandvi, Horatio Sanz (last heard in "Wreck-It Ralph"), Joey Slotnick, J.B. Smoove (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Nasim Pedrad, Garry Shandling (last seen in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier").
RATING: 3 out of 10 torture devices
No comments:
Post a Comment