Film review: The Dictator

YOU loved him as Borat, you were OK with him as Ali G, and we don’t really talk about Bruno. Now after a three-year absence and equipped with a magnificent Edward Lear beard, Sacha Baron Cohen reunites with director Larry Charles with a new comic persona.

The Dictator (15)

Director: Larry Charles

Running time: 124 minutes

Rating: ***

General Aladeen is the dictator of oil-rich Wadiya, where his regime is whimsical, egotistical and packed with absurd laws, such as insisting the words “positive” and “negative” both be replaced with “Aladeen”. His older brother (Ben Kingsley) is Aladeen’s right-hand man, but is keen to seize power for himself when Aladeen heads to New York to address the UN.

However, the assassination goes awry, leaving Aladeen dispossessed but alive, without clothes, wallet or beard. His absence from the political theatre is covered up with the substitution of a gormless double (also played by Baron Cohen) and no-one notices the difference, even when he urinates in public, then drinks it.

Aladeen is rescued by Zoey (Anna Faris, always game), a compassionate, unshaven feminist, who runs a failing wholefood co-operative. She gives him a job in her shop, which finally turns a profit when Aladeen is allowed to run it as a sprouted dictatorship.

And gradually he is redeemed by Zoey. The film is patterned as a rom com, underpinned by deceptive appearances, fairylight seductions, and a last minute Public Declaration of Love, but also subverted with contrivances such as a scene where Zoey and Aladeen accidentally hold hands for the first time, halfway up a pregnant woman’s birth canal.

I don’t miss the bear-baiting of Borat and Bruno, especially the sequences which seemed less about pushing boundaries and more about taking advantage of ordinary people’s embarrassed politeness. But there’s nothing in The Dictator that elicits the stranded guppy gasps that Baron Cohen’s faux documentaries could provoke in better moments. Yes, it was time to move on, but The Dictator feels like a partial regression back – way back - to Ali G Indahouse.

Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine anyone watching The Dictator and not finding at least a few of its jokes funny. In particular, Transformers’ Megan Fox does some of her very best work here, hiring herself out for an expensive night between the sheets. “I’m afraid your time is up,” she says as the Dictator begs for cuddles. “I have the Italian Prime Minister next.” Also enjoyable is John C Reilly as an American torturer who unveils his toolkit to a hog-tied Aladeen, only to be treated with the sort of patronising headshaking that owners of Audi TT coupés may recognise.

The subject matter is wide-ranging – everything from jabs at Rupert Murdoch to full-frontal nudity to the upside of a one-party state – but that’s because The Dictator doesn’t have a clear vision of itself. What could have been a deft satire is more interested in juvenile scatology, and he does love to run a joke into the ground; in particular gay relationships are constantly assumed to be hilarious and shameful.

With Bruno, I assumed Baron Cohen’s flamboyant Austrian fashion journalist was supposed to be holding a mirror to the intolerant masses but now I’m not so sure. I wonder when we’re going to call him on this. «

• On general release from Wednesday