BEFORE: Made it to the Fourth of July - this isn't the movie that I really chose as my holiday destination, but I crammed my schedule just a bit by adding "Hercules". I can make up for it, I'll just count the next film as the "official" July 4 film and double-up. But then I'm REALLY taking a couple days off, I swear. There's no reason to hurry the chain along at this point, I need to extend it and find other ways to pass the time.
Dominic Cooper carries over from "Reasonable Doubt".
THE PLOT: The world of Saddam Hussein comes to life through the eyes of the man who was given a choice - either be the double for Saddam's sadistic son, or die.
AFTER: Ugh, what a terrible movie. What a terrible IDEA for a movie, who the heck thought this would be a good idea? So it's based on a true story, so what? So some of this maybe really happened to somebody, so what? Do we all want to be reminded about Gulf War I, or Operation: Desert Storm or whatever we called it back then? Saddam Hussein and his terrible sons, who just bullied the people of Iraq around, among other things? And his son who was a violent unhinged maniac, probably a serial rapist, too? Why would anybody devote any more time to these people by watching a movie about them?
Interesting? Maybe at first, but then this all kind of devolves into nonsense or parody, and tone is kind of about everything at some point. Yeah, I'm sure maybe Uday Hussein had a look-alike, Saddam did so we never really knew if we were seeing images of the real one or the fake one, and just in case anybody tried to assassinate him, or his sons, they probably all had decoys. But what are the odds that Uday went to school with his double? That seems beyond all possible odds - and it reminds me of that episode of "The Brady Bunch" where Peter realized that a classmate looked just like him, only he wore glasses. Then they spent the whole episode doing split screen work, where the two teens were always on opposite sides of the TV screen, and pretending to interact with each other. But even as a kid, I had to figure out how the special effects were done, and I noticed that the two halves didn't COMPLETELY line up right. So unless Christopher Knight had a twin brother who was also an actor, I knew how they did it.
Of course, before that there was "The Patty Duke Show", which introduced the world to the concept of "identical cousins" - or perhaps some really complicated family affairs. And before that there was "The Prince and the Pauper", a novel by Mark Twain where a prince swaps places with a poor boy that he encounters, who looks exactly like him. "The Devil's Double" can't hold a candle to "The Prince and the Pauper", or even an episode of "The Brady Bunch". The character of Uday Hussein was so cartoonish that it reminded me more of the Jerry Lewis film "The Nutty Professor", if Professor Kelp and Buddy Love somehow were able to interact with each other. And if Buddy Love were a psychopath - and who's to say he wasn't?
I'm not sure what it meant if Uday enjoying boxing with his body double, or whipping him when he tried to escape. Normally that would suggest some kind of symbolic inner self-loathing, but I think that's giving him too much credit. I also wonder if Dominic Cooper tried for that Freddie Mercury role in "Bohemian Rhapsody", but lost it when Rami Malek came on the scene.
A reading of the subject's Wikipedia page confirms that none of Latif Yahia's claims regarding being Uday's body double can really be corroborated, and notable CIA personnel and doctors who treated the Hussein family in Iraq claim no knowledge of Yahia. So his story is suspect to begin with, and then of course Saddam's sons were both killed by an American task force in 2003, so really, there's no way we'll ever know. We do know that Uday was the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and the Iraq Football Association and was fond of torturing the athletes who didn't measure up to his standards. Sure, that'll motivate them, if they survive the torture. Why don't more coaches around the world try this?
The more I read about what really went down in Uday's life in Iraq, the worse it makes me feel, so I'm going to just stop. I wish that the filmmakers here had taken the same approach - the guy's dead, it's over, let's all just forget about him, OK? I'm going to just take the fact that this is tangentially about a war that involved America and I'm watching it on July 4 as an OK coincidence, and I'm going to try to move on and forget about all of this. Oh, there's also archive footage of a U.S. President and a future Vice-President, so I guess there's that. It's not much, but it's something I suppose.
Also starring Ludivine Sagnier (last seen in "Paris, je t'aime"), Raad Rawi (last seen in "Mona Lisa"), Philip Quast (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Mimoun Oaissa, Khalid Laith (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Dar Salim (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), Mem Ferda, Pano Masti, Akin Gazi, Amrita Acharia (last heard in "Missing Link"), Amber Rose Revah, Selva Rasalingam (last seen in "The Mummy" (2017)), Sarah-Lee Zammit, Frank Tanti, Jamie Harding (last seen in "United 93"), Marcelle Theuma, Tiziana Azzopardi, Pierre Stafrace, Frida Cauchi (last seen in "13 Hours"), Marama Corlett, Oona Chaplin (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Rachel Fabri, Stasys Baltakis, Michael Arddt, with archive footage of George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Dick Cheney (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Saddam Hussein (last seen in "What's My Name; Muhammad Ali"), Norman Schwarzkopf.
RATING: 2 out of 10 nightclub patrons forced to strip
No comments:
Post a Comment