This movie should have been better than it was. It’s loosely based (and, to me, very loosely) on the actual life of the man chosen to be Uday Hussein’s body double. It starts around the time of the Iraq/Iran war and ends several years after the first Gulf War. Dominic Cooper plays both the poor, tortured Latif the body double and his crazy, manic tormentor Uday.
What Works: The premise itself is a good one and Cooper delivers in a flashy double role that any actor would love to have.
What Doesn’t Work: It also blows a real opportunity to talk about anything remotely relevant to what’s going on in the world. It mostly just covers old events and isn’t exactly astute at tying them into more recent, post-Saddam events in Iraq or even post-911 Iraq. I felt like the movie almost went out of its way not to discuss this period or include any scenes with any characters that could at least foreshadow some of the larger world going on outside of Latif the body double.
And that’s the movie’s real problem: Latif. He’s not interesting, he’s not particularly smart, and he’s not particularly honest either. The film was made with the cooperation of the real-life Latif, but–to me at least–it felt like it was probably made with too much cooperation. There are several scenes where Latif is noble, courageous, and hits/curses/argues with Uday in a way I am CERTAIN the real Latif probably never did. In real life, he probably said whatever he had to to survive instead of constantly arguing with his “owner” Uday. Because the film is oppressively locked into Latif’s point of view, it never even makes an attempt to understand Uday. It shows him as a psychopath, and I’m sure he is, but it never even makes an effort to go deeper. And if you aren’t going to at least try, then you essentially have a movie where one character is going around doing deranged things for two hours and the other character is saying “This is horrible. I hate this man.” It’s a little like just having an obnoxious friend and saying “That’s fucked up” at him for two hours, you probably wouldn’t pay to see it.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Latif is a necessary character, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean he’s the real star of your movie. Free it of the shackles of him and make some attempt to get to know Uday and Saddam Hussein and explore their extremely complicated father/son dynamic. Also, a greater interest in history would have been welcome.
I haven’t even heard of this one but it sounds worth checking out