How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 9 August 2011
This a movie review of THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE. |
“Please be clear about this, Latif. Uday has chosen you. You belong to him. You have about five minutes to think about this. Before a car pulls up outside your house in Al-Adhamiya and your family, everyone one of them - your father, your mother, your sisters and brothers; is thrown into Abu Ghraib. God willing, they will die quickly. I've said too much. You have about two minutes left,” Munem (Raad Rawi)
This could’ve been so awesome. A snapshot of the double of Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday. Instead of going for brains, the film goes for outlandishness. But it falls short there too. It wants to be SCARFACE, though never comes close to that balletic maelstrom of mayhem and charisma. Director Lee Tamahori is no Brian De Palma. The story and script do not seem concerned with psychology, history, politics or allegory. You may say so what. And you could be right. However, what is happening and has happened in Iraq is very topical, and thus a waste that a film purporting to be about one of the key figures in the regime should only get a superficial analysis. Perhaps filmmakers and funders alike have watched the recent conflicts’ portrayals go down in flames at the box office, and thus they have eschewed polemic and gone for pure entertainment? If so, that’s a shame.
This could’ve been so awesome. A snapshot of the double of Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday. Instead of going for brains, the film goes for outlandishness. But it falls short there too. It wants to be SCARFACE, though never comes close to that balletic maelstrom of mayhem and charisma. Director Lee Tamahori is no Brian De Palma. The story and script do not seem concerned with psychology, history, politics or allegory. You may say so what. And you could be right. However, what is happening and has happened in Iraq is very topical, and thus a waste that a film purporting to be about one of the key figures in the regime should only get a superficial analysis. Perhaps filmmakers and funders alike have watched the recent conflicts’ portrayals go down in flames at the box office, and thus they have eschewed polemic and gone for pure entertainment? If so, that’s a shame.
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The saving grace for THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE, is a big one: Dominc Cooper – who knocks it out of the park. He plays both Uday and Latif Yahia, a soldier forcibly enrolled as the former’s double to make assignation attempts more difficult. Cooper’s Uday might have been a run-of-the-mill psycho, but was in fact a weirdly goofball sociopath with an overbite that actually makes the performance very watchable. There is not enough in the movie for us to understand Uday’s motivations, but maybe it’s not possible to dissect this sadist, rapist, child-molester and murderer. His every whim is indulged, probably from a young age, and any personality aberrations are arguably then accentuated.
The best scenes are when the two Coopers are interacting. The straight-man against the nutter. Everyone else is cannon fodder or story-catalysts, including the under-used Ludivine Sagnier. As THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE progresses it gets more exciting, as more seems at stake; but also increasingly frustrating as history is rushed through and character actions don’t seem to make sense. Although based on a true story, I’m not sure how much of it is. In the hands of an on-form Michael Mann, P.T. Anderson or Steven Soderbergh, this could well have been extraordinary.