The first time the young Scottish doctor meets the dictator is a moment of high drama. The dictator, whose speech the feckless Scot has admired already, has an accident – his car has hit a cow, and he’s suffered a minor injury. The doctor is summoned, the cow lies wailing in misery on the side of the road. The doctor tends to the president whilst the cow wails. His humanitarian instincts working in overdrive, the doctor seizes the President’s pistol, lying on the car bonnet, and puts the cow out of its misery. The sudden action leads the soldiers to prime their rifles. The dictator looks like he might order anything. The doctor realises he’s out of his depth. The dictator learns he’s Scottish and embraces him. The woman the doctor fancies admires his reckless heroism.
It’s a beautifully structured and executed scene which sets a standard that The Last King of Scotland can never top. Unfortunately it comes at the end of the ‘first act’: the moment when Idi meets Doctor Garrigan.
Forest Whitaker proceeds to deliver a bravura performance as the mercurial Amin. However a trope has been set: he will swing from overbearing to jocular in the space of a moment. His very unpredictability becomes predictable. The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a harder part to pull off. Here is a man who is complicit in the mechanisms of a dictatorship. His ignorance is hardly excused by his callowness. Yet at the same time he is also the romantic lead, a dashing model of globalised youth. The contradictions within the character are pertinent. McAvoy’s performance has flashes where it captures these contradictions, yet the film is reluctant to undercut its hero with too severe an examination, and his eventual sadistic torture operates as a kind of atonement. His Scottish charm lets him off the hook, and those who he could turn to for advice or support are caricatures, none more so than McBurney’s villainous-seeming Englishman, whose two-dimensional role in the film seems to be entirely to act as a foil for McAvoy’s boyish charm.
The Last King of Scotland has all the ingredients of an exhilarating film. One of the most ruthless rites of passage narratives you could ever come across. Charismatic characters, moral contradiction, sex, exoticism, violence and ‘based on a true story’. For all this, it remains something of a haggis of a movie; flavoursome but stodgy, spicy but safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climactic party scene, where Garrigan sleeps with Amin’s wife. The action is ‘heightened’ by a montage scene of topless African nubiles, dreamlike images of Amin entering the doctor’s consciousness, burning flames. Perhaps this is a wilful homage to seventies Bond movies, but if so, one wonders, why?
At the end of the movie, Amin berates Garrigan for playing the white tourist in exotic Africa. It’s a valid point which has been waiting to be made. There does seem a danger that a Western film set in Africa will echo this voyeurism. The Last King of Scotland tries to steer clear of the worst excesses of Amin’s rule, but it is still trading on the notion of the dark continent, where unspeakable things will inevitably happen, to be re-presented for Western consumption and entertainment. At the end of the movie the chastened Garrigan flies out on a plane; we go with him, little the wiser about the continent we’ve been invited to visit in his company for an hour or so.
It’s a beautifully structured and executed scene which sets a standard that The Last King of Scotland can never top. Unfortunately it comes at the end of the ‘first act’: the moment when Idi meets Doctor Garrigan.
Forest Whitaker proceeds to deliver a bravura performance as the mercurial Amin. However a trope has been set: he will swing from overbearing to jocular in the space of a moment. His very unpredictability becomes predictable. The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a harder part to pull off. Here is a man who is complicit in the mechanisms of a dictatorship. His ignorance is hardly excused by his callowness. Yet at the same time he is also the romantic lead, a dashing model of globalised youth. The contradictions within the character are pertinent. McAvoy’s performance has flashes where it captures these contradictions, yet the film is reluctant to undercut its hero with too severe an examination, and his eventual sadistic torture operates as a kind of atonement. His Scottish charm lets him off the hook, and those who he could turn to for advice or support are caricatures, none more so than McBurney’s villainous-seeming Englishman, whose two-dimensional role in the film seems to be entirely to act as a foil for McAvoy’s boyish charm.
The Last King of Scotland has all the ingredients of an exhilarating film. One of the most ruthless rites of passage narratives you could ever come across. Charismatic characters, moral contradiction, sex, exoticism, violence and ‘based on a true story’. For all this, it remains something of a haggis of a movie; flavoursome but stodgy, spicy but safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climactic party scene, where Garrigan sleeps with Amin’s wife. The action is ‘heightened’ by a montage scene of topless African nubiles, dreamlike images of Amin entering the doctor’s consciousness, burning flames. Perhaps this is a wilful homage to seventies Bond movies, but if so, one wonders, why?
At the end of the movie, Amin berates Garrigan for playing the white tourist in exotic Africa. It’s a valid point which has been waiting to be made. There does seem a danger that a Western film set in Africa will echo this voyeurism. The Last King of Scotland tries to steer clear of the worst excesses of Amin’s rule, but it is still trading on the notion of the dark continent, where unspeakable things will inevitably happen, to be re-presented for Western consumption and entertainment. At the end of the movie the chastened Garrigan flies out on a plane; we go with him, little the wiser about the continent we’ve been invited to visit in his company for an hour or so.
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